| The premise of the experiment is akin to considering whether or not people are prone to being swindled by a three card monte con-game. The premise of the example only demonstrates a susceptibility to a situation where the individual is not expecting to be judged based on technicalities. Technically, in a three card monte game, on the street, you have no assurance that the dealer is operating the deck with integrity. Technically, on the street, you have no assurance that other players are not collaborating with the dealer. Does this prove that humans are often innately irrational? Maybe insofar as any other parlour trick does. The claim that a bystander should know that their own capacity for estimation of the likelihood that Linda's occupation may be bank teller shall be poor, is masked, in terms of relevance to the rest of the context of the presented scenario. A bystander's estimation of feminist alignment is anticipated and intended. When the bystander chooses option (B), an assertion that they have no insight into whether Linda was a banker or not, suddenly becomes the defining aspect of the test. So now we've proven that given an unexpected context, a bystander is surprised by a sudden ambush within that context. While such nuances may be interesting on a much grander scale, in most cases, the experiment is not framed that way, as a design to misdirect the individual, and certainly, the authors of this op-ed article make the same mistake in pointing at the idea that a bystander should be expected to know that they have no way of knowing whether or not Linda might be a bank teller. |