Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
One remarkable aspect of human cognition is our ability to reason about physical events. This article provides novel evidence that intuitive physics is subject to a peculiar error, the classic conjunction fallacy, in which people rate the probability of a conjunction of two events as more likely than one constituent (a logical impossibility). Participants viewed videos of physical scenarios and judged the probability that either a single event or a conjunction of two events would occur. In Experiment 1 (n = 60), participants consistently rated conjunction events as more likely than single events for the same scenes. Experiment 2 (n = 180) extended these results to rule out several alternative explanations. Experiment 3 (n = 100) generalized the finding to different scenes. This demonstration of conjunction errors contradicts claims that such errors should not appear in intuitive physics and presents a serious challenge to current theories of mental simulation in physical reasoning.