I recently joked with a friend that I have completed a 10-day Vipassana course and shaken Frank Sinatra's hand.Psychologists conducted an experiment in which they asked subjects to rank the probability of various scenarios, such as the followings:
- Miss X has shaken Frank Sinatra's hand
- Miss X has completed a 10-day Vipassana course
- Miss X has completed a 10-day Vipassana course and shaken Frank Sinatra's hand
Many subjects ranked the probability of scenarios like (3) above scenarios like (1) and (2).
If the probability of (1) is p and the probability of (2) q, then, since undertaking a Vipassan course and shaking Ol' Blue Eyes's hand would have been independent events, the joint probability of scenario (3) would be given by p x q, which would be smaller than (1) or (2), or both.
