Description

Tendency for people to neglect that extremely high or extremely low observations tend to become more moderate (i.e., closer to the mean) over time.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80(4), 237–251.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.

Items (1)

After the first 2 weeks of the major league baseball season, newspapers begin to print the top 10 batting averages. Typically, after 2 weeks, the leading batter often has an average of about 0.450. However, no batter in major league history has ever averaged 0.450 at the end of the season. Why do you think this is? Circle one:

a. When a batter is known to be hitting for a high average, pitchers bear down more when they pitch to him.
b. Pitchers tend to get better over the course of a season, as they get more in shape. As pitchers improve, they are more likely to strike out batters, so batters' averages go down.
c. A player's high average at the beginning of the season may be just luck. The longer season provides a more realistic test of a batter's skill.
d. A batter who has such a hot streak at the beginning of the season is under a lot of stress to maintain his performance record. Such stress adversely affects his playing.
e. When a batter is known to be hitting for a high average, he stops getting good pitches to hit. Instead, pitchers "play the corners" of the plate because they don't mind walking him.

Scoring

Score of 1 if the participant chose the normative response (c), all other options are scored as 0.

Source

Toplak, M. E., Liu, E., Macpherson, R., Toneatto, T., & Stanovich, K. E. (2007). The reasoning skills and thinking dispositions of problem gamblers: A dual-process taxonomy. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 20(2), 103–124.