Items are seen as more important when put into a relatively-large group

>The first contained 5 black, 5 grey and 5 white balls.

>The second contained 2 black, 11 grey and 2 white balls. You can see here in the second version that the grey is a relatively large category.

>Despite the fact that the chance of each ball being plucked from the lottery bowl being equal, people were then asked to estimate the probability of a grey number 8 ball being chosen.

>And the answers were crazy! People judged chance of choosing the grey 8 ball to be higher in the lottery with 11 grey balls, than the one with 5 grey balls. Put another way, because there were more grey balls than black or white, they thought that the grey #8 ball was more likely to come up.

I felt that this result could be found easily by people simply misinterpreting the question. I was very confused by the text in the article.

The question was: What is the chance of the grey ball LABELLED BALL NUMBER EIGHT to be plucked. Which is obviously 1/15th in each experiment but the question could be easily misinterpreted to mean: what is the chance of the 8th ball being grey. I have not yet read the original reseach paper Isaac & Brough (2014) so I might be wrong.

I just feel like that "people were then asked to estimate the probability of a grey number 8 ball being chosen" is worded very awkwardly ...

I wouldn't have expected this result - the roulette example was interesting, though I don't see an actual source for it. Very clear article, and very nice design on the site. I'm glad to have found this, their other articles look interesting as well.

eh, this article was interesting in that it gave a good basic overview of how to take advantage over a small cognitive bias. It is similar to that of how middle schoolers have a fable/imaginary audience conceptualization in their development. If they think that there is a background story behind it then they are more likely to act. This is qualitative at best. Just my opinion. Thanks.