Journal ArticleDOI
Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives
Daniel Kahneman,Dale T. Miller +1 more
TLDR
In this article, a theory of norms and normality is presented and applied to some phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes, such as emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior and the role of norms in causal questions and answers.Abstract:
A theory of norms and normality is presented and applied to some phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes. Norms are assumed to be constructed ad hoc by recruiting specific representations. Category norms are derived by recruiting exemplars. Specific objects or events generate their own norms by retrieval of similar experiences stored in memory or by construction of counterfactual alternatives. The normality of a stimulus is evaluated by comparing it to the norms that it evokes after the fact, rather than to precomputed expectations. Norm theory is applied in analyses of the enhanced emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, of the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior, and of the role of norms in causal questions and answers. This article is concerned with category norms that represent knowledge of concepts and with stimulus norms that govern comparative judgments and designate experiences as surprising. In the tradition of adaptation level theory (Appley, 1971; Helson, 1964), the concept of norm is applied to events that range in complexity from single visual displays to social interactions. We first propose a model of an activation process that produces norms, then explore the role of norms in social cognition. The central idea of the present treatment is that norms are computed after the event rather than in advance. We sketch a supplement to the generally accepted idea that events in the stream of experience are interpreted and evaluated by consulting precomputed schemas and frames of reference. The view developed here is that each stimulus selectively recruits its own alternatives (Garner, 1962, 1970) and is interpreted in a rich context of remembered and constructed representations of what it could have been, might have been, or should have been. Thus, each event brings its own frame of reference into being. We also explore the idea that knowledge of categories (e.g., "encounters with Jim") can be derived on-line by selectively evoking stored representations of discrete episodes and exemplars. The present model assumes that a number of representations can be recruited in parallel, by either a stimulus event or anread more
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Book ChapterDOI
Deriving Categories to Achieve Goals
TL;DR: This chapter discusses that categorization focuses on the issue of access and the roles that categories play in the cognitive system following their access, and proposes that goal-derived categories provide sets of instantiations for frame attributes during planning and common taxonomic categories constitute the building blocks of world models.
Journal ArticleDOI
Focusing on the Forgone: How Value Can Appear So Different to Buyers and Sellers
Ziv Carmon,Dan Ariely +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined buying and selling-price estimates of tickets for National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball games and found that buyers and sellers differ not only in their valuation of the same item but also in how they assess the value.
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Confabulation and the Control of Recollection
Paul W. Burgess,Tim Shallice +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that current models of memory do not adequately account for the confabulations that are found in the recall of certain neurological patients, and a model of the relation between control processes and memory involved in recalling autobiographical episodes is put forward.
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The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality
TL;DR: The Rational Imagination is argued that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined and counterfactual thoughts are organised along the same principles as rational thought.
Journal ArticleDOI
The ostrich effect: Selective attention to information
TL;DR: In this article, the authors develop and test a model which links information acquisition decisions to the hedonic utility of information, which predicts asymmetric preferences for the timing of resolution of uncertainty.
References
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Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk
Daniel Kahneman,Amos Tversky +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and develop an alternative model, called prospect theory, in which value is assigned to gains and losses rather than to final assets and in which probabilities are replaced by decision weights.