The empirical content of theories in judgment and decision making: Shortcomings and remedies
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2011, Vol 6, Issue 8
Abstract
According to Karl Popper, we can tell good theories from poor ones by assessing their empirical content (empirischer Gehalt), which basically reflects how much information they convey concerning the world. “The empirical content of a statement increases with its degree of falsifiability: the more a statement forbids, the more it says about the world of experience.” Two criteria to evaluate the empirical content of a theory are their level of universality (Allgemeinheit) and their degree of precision (Bestimmtheit). The former specifies how many situations it can be applied to. The latter refers to the specificity in prediction, that is, how many subclasses of realizations it allows. We conduct an analysis of the empirical content of theories in Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) and identify the challenges in theory formulation for different classes of models. Elaborating on classic Popperian ideas, we suggest some guidelines for publication of theoretical work.
Authors and Affiliations
Andreas Glöckner and Tilmann Betsch
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677855
- DOI -
- Views 132
- Downloads 0
Thinking dispositions and cognitive reflection performance in schizotypy
Schizotypy refers to the continuum of normal variability of psychosis-like characteristics and experiences, often classified as positive schizotypy (‘unusual experiences’; UE) and negative schizotypy (‘introvertive anhed...
A Bayesian latent mixture model approach to assessing performance in stock-flow reasoning
People often perform poorly on stock-flow reasoning tasks, with many (but not all) participants appearing to erroneously match the accumulation of the stock to the inflow – a response pattern attributed to the use of a “...
A shocking experiment: New evidence on probability weighting and common ratio violations
We study whether probability weighting is observed when individuals are presented with a series of choices between lotteries consisting of real non-monetary adverse outcomes, electric shocks. Our estimation of the parame...
Attribute salience in graphical representations affects evaluation
By manipulating the scale in graphs, this study demonstrated a new evaluation bias caused by attribute salience in graphical representations. That is, (de)compressing the graph axis scale changed the relative distance wi...
Terrorism, dread risk and bicycle accidents
Following the airplane attacks of September 11th, 2001 it is claimed that many Americans, dreading a repeat of these events, drove instead of flying, and that, consequently, there were extra car accidents, increasing the...