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Ways of presenting opinions depend on mental cultures which include i.a. styles of forming judgments on possibility and on probability of events and of states of affairs. Research on a large multilingual corpus of texts in several West-European languages and in Russian shows that the possibility statements are used more than twice as often as the probability statements. The term 'possibility' in Latin and in modern languages denotes a physicalist attitude towards states of affairs. This term was coined much later than the term 'probability', originally connected to the human aspects of evaluation. The term 'probabilis' itself in Latin was a cognate of 'probare', which meant 'approving' and/or 'controlling' events. Additionally, in modern Romance languages, judgments of doubt and hope, i. e. sentences conveying speaker's distancing from alien and non-actual opinions, usually contain verbs in a special 'conjunctive mood'. Creating alternative 'possible worlds' as a figure of speech for 'conjecture' originated and was extensively used in writings by Leibniz in French, who used this figure in accordance with French grammar. The same ideas formulated in Russian or in German lack the 'subjunctive' mood, whereas it is obligatory in French.

AbstractAs in other areas of expert judgment, intelligence analysis often requires judging the probability that hypotheses are true. Intelligence organizations promote the use of structured methods such as "Analysis of Competing Hypotheses" (ACH) to improve judgment accuracy and analytic rigor, but these methods have received little empirical testing. In this experiment, we pitted ACH against a factorized Bayes's theorem (FBT) method, and we examined the value of recalibration (coherentization) and aggregation methods for improving the accuracy of probability judgment. Analytic techniques such as ACH and FBT were ineffective in improving accuracy and handling correlated evidence, and ACH in fact decreased the coherence of probability judgments. In contrast, statistical postanalytic methods (i.e., coherentization and aggregation) yielded large accuracy gains. A wide range of methods for instantiating these techniques were tested. The interactions among the factors considered suggest that prescriptive theorists and interventionists should examine the value of ensembles of judgment‐support methods.

Human forecasts and other probabilistic judgments can be improved by elicitation and aggregation methods. Recent work on elicitation shows that deriving probability estimates from relative judgments (the ratio method) is advantageous, whereas other recent work on aggregation shows that it is beneficial to transform probabilities into coherent sets (coherentization) and to weight judges' assessments by their degree of coherence. We report an experiment that links these areas by examining the effect of coherentization and multiple forms of coherence weighting using direct and ratio elicitation methods on accuracy of probability judgments (both forecasts and events with known distributions). We found that coherentization invariably yields improvements to accuracy. Moreover, judges' levels of probabilistic coherence are related to their judgment accuracy. Therefore, coherence weighting can improve judgment accuracy, but the strength of the effect varies among elicitation and weighting methods. As well, the benefit of coherence weighting is stronger on "calibration" items that served as a basis for establishing the weights than for unrelated "test" items. Finally, echoing earlier research, we found overconfidence in judgment, and the degree of overconfidence was comparable between the two elicitation methods.

ABSTRACT
Following the trend toward a globalized accounting standard, many non-English-speaking countries have adopted the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Translation of the IFRS from English to other languages is inevitable; thus, it is crucial to ensure that the original meanings of the standard requirements are not affected by translation. Using accounting students from a university in Taiwan as participants, we found that nearly half of probability expressions from the IFRS were differently interpreted before and after translation. And the effects of translation were moderated by the participants' accounting knowledge and English proficiency. Our results show that improving participants' accounting knowledge or English fluency would reduce variations in interpretations of probability expressions before and after the translation. Finally, we found that translation has more impact on participants' interpretations of negative expressions than positive expressions.

Consumers might be said to have a prediction addiction—they speculate about sports, politics, weather, stocks, sweepstakes, health, and relationships, to name just a few areas. What's more, predictions often guide their decisions.For example, they may decide to carry an umbrella after considering the chance of rain, to invest after forecasting the stock market's performance, or to marry after predicting the likelihood of marital bliss. With all this practice, one might expect consumers to be good at judging probability. However, their predictions are often wrong. ; https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/huntsman_news/1175/thumbnail.jpg

Many economic decisions involve a substantial amount of uncertainty, and therefore crucially depend on how individuals process probabilistic information. In this paper, we investigate the capability for probability judgment in a representative sample of the German population. Our results show that almost a third of the respondents exhibits systematically biased perceptions of probability. The findings also indicate that the observed biases are related to individual economic outcomes, which suggests potential policy relevance of our findings.

Abstract. Background: Diabetes continues to be a major health problem around the globe, and low treatment adherence continues to hinder clinical outcomes. Risk perception has been considered to guide the decision-making processes, and in recent years, the bounded rationality theory and cognitive heuristics have proved to be a useful lens to gain insight into informal and irrational reasoning. In particular, heuristics for the estimation of event frequencies and probabilities are considered to be relevant to the field of health behaviors. It is possible that the risk perceptions that determine patients' adherence could be generated by these heuristics. Aims: The purpose of this study is to analyze the role of the representativeness heuristic in risk perceptions related to heart attacks and coronary heart disease (CHD) in a sample of patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Method: Cross-sectional study with 342 patients attending a public hospital in an urban setting to treat their diabetes. Results: The heuristic was correlated through both its mechanisms with CHD and heart attack. Evidence suggests that the representativeness heuristic might play a role in probability judgments related to heart complications in patients with T2D. Limitations: Only CHD and heart attack were included in the study, and the heuristic could correlate with the risk perception of other complications as well as the perceived risks and benefits of the diabetes treatment. Conclusion: We call for researchers to further study these heuristics in the context of treatment adherence of T2D patients.