What is it about?
When dealing with simple probabilities and proportions, people need to consider a list of one to six possibilities. An incomplete mental representation is one that leaves out one or more possibility. People need to count the number of occurrences of a target event in their mental representation and compute its proportion to the extension (=size) of the mental representation. The resulting probability estimate is accurate only when all possibilities have been considered.
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Why is it important?
Decision making and risk assessment depend on correct estimation of probabilities. Extensional reasoning can be difficult because several steps are required to get to the correct solution. At each step, one may make an error. The most common error is to overlook some possibilities.
Perspectives
This article discusses extensional reasoning and the implications of common reasoning errors (i.e. leaving out possibilities) for decision making and risk assessment. I hope that being aware of our tendency to leave out possibilities at the moment of decision, we may consider extra possibilities rather than considering just one 'obvious' possibility, or a dichotomy with just two mental models 'go versus no-go'.
Dr. Thierry Chevalley
Associatie KU Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Considering Too Few Alternatives: The Mental Model Theory of Extensional Reasoning, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, April 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1049622.
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