Kahneman and Tversky (1973) asked participants to make judgments about the likelihood that people with certain characteristics were lawyers or engineers. These participants were also told the proportion of people in the overall population who were lawyers or engineers. In this situation

a) participants made their judgments based on a combination of base rate and diagnostic information.

b) participants ignored both types of information and made their decisions at random.

c) participants ignored diagnostic information and relied only on base rate.

d) participants ignored base rate and relied only on diagnostic information

In the given situation, participants ignored base rate and relied only on diagnostic information.

Answer: Option D

Explanation:

Nearly total responses that vary from the base rate were justified in absence of reference to the base rate which declared that base rate is neglected when observed in this case however base rate is dependent on the mental representation of task which in turn lies on relevance consideration.

The awareness about the psychological description's difficulty is utilized to the limit which is considered by the participant and found it relevant. The diagnostic information acquired by three-quarters of participants involved in the diagnostic description with statement conditions into account when they were needed to fetch it out from the difficult descriptions.