Less-is-more effects without the recognition heuristic
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2010, Vol 5, Issue 4
Abstract
Inferences consistent with “recognition-based” decision-making may be drawn for various reasons other than recognition alone. We demonstrate that, for 2-alternative forced-choice decision tasks, less-is-more effects (reduced performance with additional learning) are not restricted to recognition-based inference but can also be seen in circumstances where inference is knowledge-based but item knowledge is limited. One reason why such effects may not be observed more widely is the dependence of the effect on specific values for the validity of recognition and knowledge cues. We show that both recognition and knowledge validity may vary as a function of the number of items recognized. The implications of these findings for the special nature of recognition information, and for the investigation of recognition-based inference, are discussed.
Authors and Affiliations
C. Philip Beaman, Philip T. Smith, Caren A. Frosch and Rachel McCloy
Time preference and its relationship with age, health, and survival probability
Although theories from economics and evolutionary biology predict that one’s age, health, and survival probability should be associated with one’s subjective discount rate (SDR), few studies have empirically tested for t...
The curious tale of Julie and Mark: Unraveling the moral dumbfounding effect
The paper critically reexamines the well-known “Julie and Mark” vignette, a stylized account of two college-age siblings opting to engage in protected sex while vacationing abroad (e.g., Haidt, 2001). Since its inception...
Why do we overestimate others’ willingness to pay?
People typically overestimate how much others are prepared to pay for consumer goods and services. We investigated the extent to which latent beliefs about others’ affluence contribute to this overestimation. In Studies...
Testing the ability of the surprisingly popular method to predict NFL games
We consider the recently-developed “surprisingly popular” method for aggregating decisions across a group of people (Prelec, Seung and McCoy, 2017). The method has shown impressive performance in a range of decision-maki...
Measuring the relative contributions of rule-based and exemplar-based processes in judgment: Validation of a simple model
Judgments and decisions can rely on rules to integrate cue information or on the retrieval of similar exemplars from memory. Research on exemplar-based processes in judgment has discovered several task variables influenc...