The recognition heuristic: A decade of research
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2011, Vol 6, Issue 1
Abstract
The recognition heuristic exploits the basic psychological capacity for recognition in order to make inferences about unknown quantities in the world. In this article, we review and clarify issues that emerged from our initial work (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999, 2002), including the distinction between a recognition and an evaluation process. There is now considerable evidence that (i) the recognition heuristic predicts the inferences of a substantial proportion of individuals consistently, even in the presence of one or more contradicting cues, (ii) people are adaptive decision makers in that accordance increases with larger recognition validity and decreases in situations when the validity is low or wholly indeterminable, and (iii) in the presence of contradicting cues, some individuals appear to select different strategies. Little is known about these individual differences, or how to precisely model the alternative strategies. Although some researchers have attributed judgments inconsistent with the use of the recognition heuristic to compensatory processing, little research on such compensatory models has been reported. We discuss extensions of the recognition model, open questions, unanticipated results, and the surprising predictive power of recognition in forecasting.
Authors and Affiliations
Gerd Gigerenzer and Daniel G. Goldstein
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677782
- DOI -
- Views 144
- Downloads 0
Possession, feelings of ownership and the endowment effect
Research in judgment and decision making generally ignores the distinction between factual and subjective feelings of ownership, tacitly assuming that the two correspond closely. The present research suggests that this a...
Dishonest helping and harming after (un)fair treatment
People experience fair and unfair treatment daily, and at times may react by breaking ethical rules and lying. Here, we assess the extent to which individuals engage in dishonest behavior aimed at helping or harming othe...
The power of moral words: Loaded language generates framing effects in the extreme dictator game
Understanding whether preferences are sensitive to the frame has been a major topic of debate in the last decades. For example, several works have explored whether the dictator game in the give frame gives rise to a diff...
The role of actively open-minded thinking in information acquisition, accuracy, and calibration
Errors in estimating and forecasting often result from the failure to collect and consider enough relevant information. We examine whether attributes associated with persistence in information acquisition can predict per...
Trolley problems in context
Would you redirect a trolley to save five people even if it means that the trolley will run over a person on the side track? Most people say they would. Would you push that same person into the path of the trolley in ord...