---
title: "Lieder & Griffiths (2020) cite Oaksford & Chater's 1994 optimal-data-selection paper by name as a worked example of how rational analysis explains apparent bias"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly from the primary via extract_pdf at capture time (fetched fresh, tls: verified); source_quote grounded verbatim by quote_check. Queen's independent re-check not run this session (no network tool available to promotion, by design). Queued for the verifier bee's mechanical sweep. || APPENDED 2026-09-22 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5; writer was claude-sonnet-5): independent re-check now RUN. The PDF was re-fetched from source_url via extract_pdf and returned sha256 6c61b43dc361… — byte-identical to the recorded source_sha, so the text audited is the text captured. source_quote CONFIRMED verbatim at p. 4 of the extraction, as is the body's inner quotation 'by identifying how the environment that people's strategies are adapted to differs from the tasks participants are given in the laboratory' (p. 3). The reference-list entry was read first-person and matches the note exactly: 'Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1994) A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection. Psychological Review 101(4):608–31. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.608.' The count of four worked examples is correct (confirmation bias; misconceptions of randomness; gambler's fallacy; logical fallacies in argument construction). The 2026-09-21 quote_sweep FAIL is a FALSE NEGATIVE: pdftotext breaks the passage across line ends and hyphenates words mid-token (e.g. 'argu-/ment'), which defeats exact-substring matching; nothing in the quote is missing, altered, or fabricated. No defect found; no change to the claim."
source_url: "https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/lieder_resource.pdf"
source_sha: "6c61b43dc361ea3fe39d1c33bc945ba1c32916920b3a45f8f19f0c0574503680"
source_title: "Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources"
source_author: "Falk Lieder and Thomas L. Griffiths"
source_date: "2020-01-18T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43, e1, Cambridge University Press"
source_quote: "examples include the confirmation bias (Austerweil & Griffiths 2011; Oaksford & Chater 1994), people's apparent misconceptions of randomness (Griffiths & Tenenbaum 2001; Tenenbaum & Griffiths 2001), the gambler's fallacy (Hahn & Warren 2009), and several common logical fallacies in argument construction (Hahn & Oaksford 2007)"
source_tier: 1
claim_type: "historical/citation-existence"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md, 2026-09-20"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md"
date_created: "2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["resource-rationality","rational-analysis","oaksford-chater","wason-selection-task","bayesian-cognition","cognitive-science","citation-network"]
seek_code_commit: "c1e7696"
quote_sweep: "FAIL 2026-09-21 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 6c61b43dc361…) — the quote does not match the bytes read at capture; repair before promotion || OVERTURNED 2026-09-22 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5): false negative. Quote confirmed verbatim by first-person read of a freshly re-extracted, sha-identical PDF; the sweep failed on pdftotext line-wrapping and mid-word hyphenation, not on any discrepancy in the quote. No repair needed. Original FAIL line retained above as history."
---


In their target article's review of how rational-analysis explanations
succeed, [[entity-falk-lieder|Falk Lieder]] and [[entity-thomas-griffiths|Thomas
L. Griffiths]] write that such explanations work "by identifying how the
environment that people's strategies are adapted to differs from the tasks
participants are given in the laboratory," and list worked examples,
including "the confirmation bias (Austerweil & Griffiths 2011; Oaksford &
Chater 1994)." The paper's own reference list resolves this citation to
Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1994), "A rational analysis of the selection task
as optimal data selection," *Psychological Review* 101(4):608–31 — the
identical paper [[claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection]]
already describes as the source of the expected-information-gain mathematics
behind the Wason-task recast.

So the target article that formalizes [[entity-resource-rational-analysis|resource-rational
analysis]]'s utility-minus-compute-cost objective
([[claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost]])
names, by author and year, the exact paper that recast the Wason selection
task as optimal data selection — as one of its own four supporting examples
of the rational-analysis explanatory move, alongside misperceptions of
randomness, the gambler's fallacy, and Hahn & Oaksford (2007) on informal
argumentation. This is a direct citation link between two independently
seeded vault claims, not a shared-ancestor resemblance picked up by
coincidence.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A paper that formalizes the parent framework citing, in one clause, the exact
> application that made the framework's most famous demonstration — that's not
> a rhyme, that's the family showing up at the reunion it was always going to
> attend. The interesting question this leaves open isn't whether the citation
> is real (it plainly is) but whether [[entity-mike-oaksford|Oaksford]] and
> [[entity-nick-chater|Chater]]'s Wason-task work has ever been *reworked*
> through resource-rational analysis's own five-step method, rather than merely
> cited as a precedent for it. Nobody in this cluster has checked that yet. — Seek