Fictional Bias

The initial example is inane. I believe XKCD has an appropriate comment on the matter.

In more detail: While strictly speaking "Frodo Baggins" may not be a unique identifier, there is a fictional person people will understand it to mean without additional context; as such, without that additional context, it must be taken as the usual meaning of "Frodo Baggins". Hence we get it "wrong" only because you used the name "Frodo Baggins" with a meaning other than its usual one. (Analogous to the comic.)

If you did something to indicate that it need not be the usual Frodo Baggins -- for instance, opening it with "Someone named Frodo Baggins", and the effect still (or rather actually) occurred, that would be an example.

Edit: Oh, hell. Just took a look at the references. I had actually thought this was intended seriously...

It's a standard conversational shorthand to just say "Frodo Baggins" instead of "Frodo Baggins from the Lord of the Rings". Going "ha ha! I didn't really mean THAT Frodo!" is a sophomoric word game, and completely unrelated to the topic of fictional evidence.

I agree with your point, but all you really do is describe the idea. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lw/fictional_evidence_vs_fictional_insight links to two other posts on this topic already, one of which is part of the Sequences, and this post doesn't really seem to add anything new.

I really, really dislike April Fool's jokes like this. Somebody will stumble onto this post at a later date, read it quickly, and come away misinformed.

I'll grant that the obviously horrible "Frodo Baggins" example should leave a bad taste in rationalists' mouths, but a glance at the comments shows that several readers initially took the post seriously, even on April 1st.

I would have believed everything you said if I hadn't read the comments. Now I'm going to subconsciously remember this article and use it as fictional evidence about the danger of fictional evidence.

I understood the introductory question as "Frodo Baggins from the Lord of the Rings is buying pants. Which of these is he most likely to buy?", and correctly answered (c). I suggest rephrasing your question to ensure that it actually tests the reader's fictional bias. Also, Szalinski in Journal of Cognitive Minification is a nice one.

This deserves some time in the penalty box.

Am I the only one who didn't fall for it, and actually said "Wait, they didn't say it was THE Frodo, so really it's probably just some dude named Frodo and he probably wears a size 32/30."? I think it's actually a result of what we might call the "Ackbar effect" (it's a trap!); when presented with something that you expect to be an optical illusion, lateral-thinking puzzle, evidence of bias, etc. you immediately question your intuitive response or even force yourself into answering differently from your intuition. "I know those lines don't look parallel... but it's an optical illusion, so they must be." (You could then fool such people by giving them "illusions" that aren't; e.g. the lines don't look parallel because they really aren't parallel.)

For those who haven't seen thomblake's previous masterpiece. :)

Shame it's a fictional study, as the effect is almost certainly absolutely real and measurable. Study after study suggests that any association that pops up in your mind affects your behavior - I see no reason why fictional associations would be any less effective than all the other logically inapplicable associations which have been shown to have this kind of an effect. Here's an essentially randomly picked study on such things - it was just the first one I found googling for this kind of effect. The stereotype effect

Well, it is the case that people are biased by fiction. I'm thinking this fiction is going to bias some people into thinking people are not biased by fiction, and perhaps some other people, other way around.

This shows up as April 02 in my browser.

Hazards of living in Asia... it can be the morning of April 2nd where you live, and in the Western Hemisphere they're STILL playing April Fool's jokes.

Dr. Sidney Zweibel and Dr. Emilio Lizardo

I don't know if i can trust a paper written by people with names like those... but then again, i'm probably just being irrational, just like you've explained.

I take a look at the date and I wonder...

I expect that this 'bias' probably DOES have a real effect on people's thoughts and opinions, admittedly not as strong of one as in the 'evidence' provided by the article. Perhaps not for drugs, because fictional drugs tend to be bad instead of good in my experience and I don't think anybody names real drugs after fictional ones.
However, being named after a character in a popular work of fiction probably could change others' first impressions of you.

I read the first few sentences and was about to start formulating my enraged response, but then I looked at the date. Well played, my friend. Well played.

Pfft. And here I was hoping that I would harvest some good citations for the part of my essay which deals with exactly this subject - the pernicious distorting effect of fiction on our beliefs.

I should have remembered what day it was...

sorry if this is a random thought but i wonder whether this 'fictional bias' has guided the development of technology - as in seeing it in science fiction makes it seem more credible/real/potential/even needed and therefore scientists go out and make the technology to meet the fiction. realise this is not an exact match to the definition but it relates no? so if science fiction had come up with different technology would we have concentrated our efforts elsewhere and not be using mobile phones today for example.

I didn't fall for it either.

I assumed he just grabbed the name "Frodo Baggins" to represent a hypothetical male, unrelated to Lord of the Rings.

I got the answer right.... just because 30 is very small and 48 is very large, both seeming to represent smaller portions of society. I figured it was the 32 just based on probability of 'average size'.

For that matter, I couldn't stop my mind throwing up objections like "Frodo buys off-the-rack clothes? From where exactly? Surely he'd have tailor made? Wouldn't he be translated into British English as saying 'trousers'? Hobbit feet are big and hairy for Hobbits, but how big are they compared to human feet -- are their feet and inches 2/3 the size?"

It didn't occur to me until I'd read past the first two paragraphs that we were even theoretically supposed to ACTUALLY guess what size Frodo would wear. And I'm still unsure if the badness of the Frodo example was supposed to be part of the joke or not -- I mean, it's fairly funny if it is, but it's the sort of mistake (a bad example for a good point) I'd expect to see even made by intelligent, competent writers.

And I mean, I'm fairly sure that the fictional bias effect is real :)

But these could be written off as merely disturbed individuals. But as it turns out, we're affected by this bias in our daily lives.

Isn't that how it always is? Disturbed individuals have exaggerated biases relative to normal people, not entirely new ones.

Good joke. The references are especially good.

This looks like a particularly concrete and insidious instantiation of the narrative fallacy.