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  3. Linda is single, outspoken and deeply engaged with social issues. Which of the following is more likely? That Linda is a bank ma

Linda is single, outspoken and deeply engaged with social issues. Which of the following is more likely? That Linda is a bank ma

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问题     Linda is single, outspoken and deeply engaged with social issues. Which of the following is more likely? That Linda is a bank manager or that Linda is a bank manager who is an active feminist? This is one of the best-known problems in behavioural economics. Many people say that the second option is more likely. Yet, the standard response goes, this cannot be. The rules of probability tell us the probability that both A and B are true cannot exceed the probability that either A or B is true. Yet even people trained in probability make a mistake with the Linda problem.
    Or is it a mistake? Little self-examination is required to understand what is going on. Respondents do not interpret the question as one about probability. They think it is a question about believability. The description of Linda that ends with the statement "Linda is a bank manager" is designed to be inconsistent. The addition — "who is an active feminist" begins to restore coherence. The story becomes more believable, even if less probable.
    We do not often, or easily, think in terms of probabilities, because there are not many situations in which this style of thinking is useful. Probability theory is a marvellous tool for games of chance such as spinning a roulette wheel. The structure of the problem is comprehensively defined by the rules of the game. The set of outcomes is well defined and bounded, and we will soon know which outcome has occurred. But most of the problems we face in the business and financial worlds or in our personal lives -- are not like that. The rules are ill-defined, the range of outcomes is wider than we can easily imagine and often we do not fully comprehend what has happened even after the event.
    We deal with that world by constructing simplifying narratives. We do this not because we are stupid, or irrational, but because storytelling is the best means of making sense of complexity. The test of these narratives is whether they are believable. Jurors convict a defendant because they find the prosecution’s account of events believable.
    The rise of quantitative finance has led people to squeeze many things into the framework of probability. The invention of subjective or personal probabilities proved to be a means of applying a well-established branch of mathematics to a new range of problems. This approach had the appearance of science, and enabled young turks to marginalise the war stories of innumerate old fogies. The old fogies may have known something after all, however.
    Still, reliance on narration is problematic. We are predisposed to find evidence that confirms our existing beliefs. That leads some people to become obsessed by narratives that offer theories of everything: libertarianism, religious and environmental fundamentalism.
    The mark of a first-rate intelligence, said the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the ability to hold conflicting ideas in the mind at the same time and still function.
The Linda problem is introduced to show that______.
选项 A、people know little about the rules of probability
B、believability is more important than probability
C、people rarely adopt the perspective of probability
D、believability does not necessarily depend on coherence
答案C
解析 第一段提出行为经济学的著名问题“琳达问题”，并指出人们通常会回答错误。第二段分析人们回答错误的原因：没有把它理解为一个概率问题，而是把它看做一个关于可信度的问题。随后下文对“概率”和“可信度”二者进行探讨。可见引用琳达问题是为了说明人们很少从“概率”的角度看待问题，[C]选项正确。
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