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The bat and ball question - total price is $1.10 and price difference is $1.00 - was introduced to me from someone who was studying psychology. I correctly answ
by onetimeusename 12y ago
The bat and ball question - total price is $1.10 and price difference is $1.00 - was introduced to me from someone who was studying psychology. I correctly answered him but only because I was trained to very carefully pay attention to the problem and to attempt to verify the answer before submitting it, so saying that the bat is $1.00 and the ball $0.10 would lead to the difference being $0.90 and therefore cannot be correct. This person's area of interest was not economics however. It seems to me like this problem is more closely meant to confuse people, hoping they pick up on a few keywords such as $1.00, $1.10, $0.10, and "difference", and then state the prices as $1.00 and $0.10 because of an assumption in place that most people have and not so much because they are irrational. Maybe you can say that is evidence of irrationality but I don't see it that way because people understand the correct solution and they also are operating on their own assumptions about it.
- ocb 12y agoYeah, I think that this is irrelevant to the article. It's just a trick question that plays off our fondness for clean, even numbers.
- WalterBright 12y agoIt's a human perceptual problem, and has nothing to do with wealth or status. The book "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman goes into some detail about it.
- VLM 12y agoI saw it as a commentary on the foreign advisors sent in to fix everything in the article. Consider trust WRT poverty. Specific poor individuals remain poor (in part) because of people kinda connected to them, playing them with trick questions and financial "innovation" and manipulating them based on trust. Occasionally westerners come to visit, even less connected, and say "trust me I've got a great idea". Well, trusting non-closely-connected people is how they ended up poor / stuck being poor, so good luck with that. The analogy is, a nice magazine author from a magazine I trust, wouldn't intentionally try to screw me with a carefully designed trick linear programming question... or would they? I guess they just did, didn't they.
- tdaltonc 12y agoThat question (and the survey it's a part of) are usually interpreted to be a measure of impulse control and ability to self monitor.