Aron Barbey

Who they are

The article lists Barbey at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland. His later positions and wider body of work have not been verified for this site, so this page does not describe them.

Key papers

Barbey, A. K., & Sloman, S. A. (2007). Base-rate respect: From ecological rationality to dual processes. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 241-254. doi:10.1017/S0140525X07001653

The article examines base-rate neglect from two angles, how people make judgments under uncertainty and what the judgments imply about human rationality. It reviews the competing perspectives, assesses how well each explains the data and how coherent it is, and concludes that a dual-process model fits the evidence best.

Key ideas

In the account Barbey and Sloman propose, base-rate neglect arises from associative judgment strategies that do not adequately capture how the categories in a problem nest within one another. The effect is smaller when problems are framed so that people can readily represent the nested groups. Open peer commentaries in the same issue, by Charles Brainerd and Christopher Wolfe among others, link the account to denominator neglect. The concept is described on the page on base-rate neglect.

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