Christopher Wolfe
Christopher R. Wolfe is the author of the 2007 Behavioral and Brain Sciences open peer commentary Adaptive redundancy, denominator neglect, and the base-rate fallacy, written in response to the target article on base-rate respect by Aron Barbey and Steven Sloman.
Who they are
The commentary lists Wolfe in the Western College Program at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. His wider body of work has not been verified for this site, so this page does not describe it.
Key papers
Wolfe, C. R. (2007). Adaptive redundancy, denominator neglect, and the base-rate fallacy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 286-287. doi:10.1017/S0140525X07001951
The commentary sets out the prediction that nested or overlapping class-inclusion relations create processing interference, which leads people to act as if they ignore the marginal denominators in a two-by-two table.
Key ideas
Wolfe argues that ignoring marginal denominators leads to fallacies in base-rate problems, and that the same error also affects estimates of conjunctive and disjunctive probabilities. The commentary places denominator neglect inside a dual-process view of the mind. The concepts are described on the pages on denominator neglect and base-rate neglect.
Sources
- Wolfe, C. R. (2007). Adaptive redundancy, denominator neglect, and the base-rate fallacy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 286-287. doi:10.1017/S0140525X07001951