The Consequences of Base-Rate Neglect on Sequential Belief Updating and Real World Beliefs

Belief updating biases have been proposed to underlie delusion propensity. A Bayesian formalization of Base-rate neglect (BRN; the underweighting of prior beliefs), predicts that belief trajectories should depend on the order that evidence is presented, manifesting as a recency bias and a form of prior-dependent updating, suggesting that base-rate neglecters may be prone to forming unusual long-term beliefs.