Women and taxis and dangerous judgments: content sensitive use of base-rate information

This study shows that the use or nonuse of base-rate information in probability estimation depends not just on the form of the problem, but also on the content about which the base-rate information is given. When the information is stated about characteristics of types of humans, it is used and recalled better than if the information is about arbitrary things. It is speculated that the content specificity is a consequence of the human mind's attentiveness to stereotypes. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.