Charles Brainerd

Who they are

The commentary lists Brainerd as working in the Departments of Human Development and Psychology and at Cornell Law School, Cornell University. His wider body of work has not been verified for this site, so this page does not describe it.

Key papers

Brainerd, C. J. (2007). Kissing cousins but not identical twins: The denominator neglect and base-rate respect models. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 257-258. doi:10.1017/S0140525X07001689

The commentary argues that Barbey and Sloman's base-rate respect model was anticipated by Reyna's denominator neglect model, and names three parallels between them.

Reyna, V. F., & Brainerd, C. J. (2008). Numeracy, ratio bias, and denominator neglect in judgments of risk and probability. Learning and Individual Differences, 18(1), 89-107. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2007.03.011

Key ideas

The three parallels in the commentary are that both models rest on a general cognitive theory rather than domain-specific ideas, that both treat problem structure as a key source of reasoning errors, and that both see nested set relations as the cause of base-rate neglect. The third is, in the commentary's view, the most important. The concepts are described on the pages on denominator neglect and base-rate neglect.

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