Journal ArticleDOI
Contingency bias in probability judgement may arise from ambiguity regarding additional causes.
TLDR
It is concluded that contingency bias may be due to ambiguity in the test question, and therefore it does not require postulation of a separate associative link-based mechanism.Abstract:
In laboratory contingency learning tasks, people usually give accurate estimates of the degree of contingency between a cue and an outcome. However, if they are asked to estimate the probability of the outcome in the presence of the cue, they tend to be biased by the probability of the outcome in the absence of the cue. This bias is often attributed to an automatic contingency detection mechanism, which is said to act via an excitatory associative link to activate the outcome representation at the time of testing. We conducted 3 experiments to test alternative accounts of contingency bias. Participants were exposed to the same outcome probability in the presence of the cue, but different outcome probabilities in the absence of the cue. Phrasing the test question in terms of frequency rather than probability and clarifying the test instructions reduced but did not eliminate contingency bias. However, removal of ambiguity regarding the presence of additional causes during the test phase did eliminate contingency bias. We conclude that contingency bias may be due to ambiguity in the test question, and therefore it does not require postulation of a separate associative link-based mechanism.read more
Citations
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Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?-Open Peer Commentary-Differences, games, and pluralism
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the implications of individual differences in performance for each of the four explanations of the normative/descriptive gap, including performance errors, computational limitations, wrong norm being applied by the experimenter, and a different construal of the task by the subject.
Causal and predictive-value judgments, but not predictions, are based on cue-outcome contingency
TL;DR: The authors show that people respond differently when they make predictions as opposed to when they are asked to estimate the causal or the predictive value of cues: their response to each of those three questions is based on different sets of information.
Journal ArticleDOI
Fooled by Heteroscedastic Randomness: Local Consistency Breeds Extremity in Price-Based Quality Inferences
TL;DR: This paper showed that consumers inappropriately conflate the conditional mean of quality with the predictability of quality, which leads to more extreme price-based quality predictions, and that quality inferences do not only stem from what consumers have learned about the average level of quality at different price points through exemplar memory or rule abstraction.
References
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Book
The construction of reality in the child
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make a distinction between simple temporal displacements in extension due to the repetition of primitive processes on the occasion of new problems analogous to old ones, and the temporal displacement in comprehension due to a transition from one plane of activity to another; that is, from the plane of action to that of representation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the implica- tions of individual differences in performance for each of the four explanations of the normative/descriptive gap, including performance errors, computational limitations, the wrong norm being applied by the experi- menter, and a different construal of the task by the subject.
Book ChapterDOI
Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment.
Daniel Kahneman,Shane Frederick +1 more
TL;DR: The program of research now known as the heuristics and biases approach began with a survey of 84 participants at the 1969 meetings of the Mathematical Psychology Society and the American Psychological Association (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971) as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning
TL;DR: Researchers in thinking and reasoning have proposed recently that there are two distinct cognitive systems underlying reasoning, and experimental psychological evidence showing that the two systems compete for control of the authors' inferences and actions is presented.