The subject matter fallacy is the fallacy of supposing that the content of a statement or a belief consists in the conditions the truth of the statement or belief puts on its subject matter: the objects the statement or belief is about. Consider my belief that Hillary Clinton is a resident of New York. The subject matter of this belief are the things and conditions (properties, relations) it is...

Ecological studies have been evaluated in epidemiological contexts in terms of the "ecological fallacy." Although the empirical evidence for a lack of comparability between correlations derived from ecological- and individual-level analyses is compelling, the conceptual meaning of the ecological fallacy remains problematic. This paper argues that issues in cross-level inference can be usefully ...

The conjunction fallacy is an anomaly in human reasoning for which the conjunction of two events is rated more likely to occur than one of the events alone. In the context of decision under uncertainty, this violates the monotonicity axiom of probability, and consequentially also Bayes’ Rule and the monotonicity axiom of preferences. Our experiments show how dynamic feedback and monetary incent...

We investigate the “law of small numbers” using a data set on lotto gambling that allows us to measure players’ reactions to draws. While most players pick the same set of numbers week after week, we find that those who do change, react on average as predicted by the law of small numbers as formalized in recent behavioral theory. In particular, players tend to bet less on numbers that were draw...

Common misconceptions of p-values are based on certain beliefs and attributions about the significance of the results. Thus, they affect the professionals' decisions and jeopardize the quality of interventions and the accumulation of valid scientific knowledge. We conducted a survey on 164 academic psychologists (134 Italian, 30 Chilean) questioned on this topic. Our findings are consistent wit...