Natural frequencies facilitate diagnostic inferences of managers

Details

Ressource 1Download: BIB_71B667A4891A.P001.pdf (1841.61 [Ko])
State: Public
Version: Final published version
Serval ID
serval:BIB_71B667A4891A
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Natural frequencies facilitate diagnostic inferences of managers
Journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Author(s)
Hoffrage U., Hafenbrädl S., Bouquet C.
ISSN
1664-1078
Publication state
Published
Issued date
06/2015
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
6
Number
642
Pages
1-11
Language
english
Abstract
In Bayesian inference tasks, information about base rates as well as hit rate and false-alarm rate needs to be integrated according to Bayes' rule after the result of a diagnostic test became known. Numerous studies have found that presenting information in a Bayesian inference task in terms of natural frequencies leads to better performance compared to variants with information presented in terms of probabilities or percentages. Natural frequencies are the tallies in a natural sample in which hit rate and false-alarm rate are not normalized with respect to base rates. The present research replicates the beneficial effect of natural frequencies with four tasks from the domain of management, and with management students as well as experienced executives as participants. The percentage of Bayesian responses was almost twice as high when information was presented in natural frequencies compared to a presentation in terms of percentages. In contrast to most tasks previously studied, the majority of numerical responses were lower than the Bayesian solutions. Having heard of Bayes' rule prior to the study did not affect Bayesian performance. An implication of our work is that textbooks explaining Bayes' rule should teach how to represent information in terms of natural frequencies instead of how to plug probabilities or percentages into a formula.
Keywords
Bayesian inference, Updating beliefs, Natural frequency, Representation format, Management, Executives, Applied business statistics
Pubmed
Web of science
Open Access
Yes
Create date
01/04/2016 16:22
Last modification date
20/08/2019 15:30
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