Human beings do assess probabilities. Their judgments are
however sometimes at odds with probability theory. One
possibility is that human cognition is imperfect or flawed in the
probability domain, showing biases and errors. Another
possibility, that we explore here, is that human probability
judgments do not rely on a weak version of probability
calculus, but rather on complexity computations. This
hypothesis is worth exploring, not only because it predicts some
of the probability ‘biases’, but also because it explains human
judgments of uncertainty in cases where probability calculus
cannot be applied. We designed such a case in which the use of
complexity when judging uncertainty is almost transparent