Martina Calderisi MA
May 1 - June 30, 2026
Affiliation: Università degli Studi di Torino
Research for a study about:
Rationality, Reasoning, and Decision Making
Presently, there is an unresolved controversy centering on how to interpret and assess the responses given by most participants involved in reasoning and decision-making tasks. It is known as the “great rationality debate” (Tetlock and Mellers, 2002) or the “rationality wars” (Samuels, Stich, and Bishop, 2002), and is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on a wide range of disciplines, mainly philosophy and cognitive science. On the one side of this controversy, there are those who maintain that deviations from standard principles of rationality (namely, principles of logic, probability theory and expected utility theory) are undesirable but real, pervasive and systematic. On the other side, there are those who argue on different grounds that this is not the case. As shown by Crupi and Girotto (2014), both diagnoses of irrationality and attempts to rescue full rationality can be spelled out as logical arguments. This methodological framework has been fruitfully applied to address e.g. base-rate neglect, that is the tendency to ignore or underweight base rates when estimating probability of uncertain events (Calderisi, 2024). In my research project, relying on these conceptual tools, I will try to shed some light on other alleged flaws in reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty. In particular, I will focus on the hindsight bias (i.e., overestimating predictability of events after they took place) and the outcome bias (i.e., judging the quality of a decision based on its outcome rather than on the information available at the time it was made), hopefully contributing to progress in the rationality debate.
Lecture
Probability, Confirmation, and the Base-Rate Fallacy
IVC Philosophy of Science Colloquium
Date: June 25, 2026
Time: 4.45 pm -6.15 pm CET
Venue for all talks: Lecture Hall 3c, NIG Universitätsstraße 7, 3rd floor, NIG/ Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna
Abstract:
Base-rate neglect is the tendency to ignore or underweight base rates when updating one’s credence in a certain hypothesis in light of new evidence. In this talk, I will present two possible determinants of this phenomenon, understood as a fallacy: representativeness and linear integration. I will also put forward an alternative proposal, according to which humans’ appreciation of confirmation relations would account for the base-rate fallacy, much as it can for the conjunction fallacy. Moreover, I will test the three explanatory hypotheses against some relevant data, and I will discuss the results of this analysis as well as its strengths and limitations. These results provide support to a confirmation-theoretic view of reasoning under uncertainty, including well-known tendencies to biased judgment of probability. (Joint work with Vincenzo Crupi, Katya Tentori, and Stefania Pighin)