Think or blink — is the recognition heuristic an “intuitive” strategy?
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2010, Vol 5, Issue 4
Abstract
Several approaches to judgment and decision making emphasize the effort-reducing properties of heuristics. One prominent example for effort-reduction is the recognition heuristic (RH) which proposes that judgments are made by relying on one single cue (recognition), ignoring other information. Our research aims to shed light on the conditions under which the RH is more useful and thus relied on more often. We propose that intuitive thinking is fast, automatic, and effortless whereas deliberative thinking is slower, stepwise, and more effortful. Because effort-reduction is thus much more important when processing information deliberately, we hypothesize that the RH should be more often relied on in such situations. In two city-size-experiments, we instructed participants to think either intuitively or deliberatively and assessed use of the RH through a formal measurement model. Results revealed that, in both experiments, use of the RH was more likely when judgments were to be made deliberatively, rather than intuitively. As such, we conclude that the potential application of heuristics is not necessarily a consequence of “intuitive” processing. Rather, their effort-reducing features are probably most beneficial when thinking more deliberatively.
Authors and Affiliations
Benjamin E. Hilbig, Sabine G. Scholl and Rüdiger F. Pohl
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677746
- DOI -
- Views 116
- Downloads 0
What have I just done? Anchoring, self-knowledge, and judgments of recent behavior
Can numerical anchors influence people’s judgments of their own recent behavior? We investigate this question in a series of six studies. In Study 1, subjects’ judgments of how many anagrams they were given assimilated t...
Are patient decision aids effective? Insight from revisiting the debate between correspondence and coherence theories of judgment
Research endeavors to determine the effectiveness of patient decision aids (PtDAs) have yielded mixed results. The conflicting evaluations are largely due to the different metrics used to assess the validity of judgments...
Accountability and adaptive performance under uncertainty: A long-term view
Accountability pressures are a ubiquitous feature of social systems: virtually everyone must answer to someone for something. Behavioral research has, however, warned that accountability, specifically a focus on being re...
The environment matters: Comparing individuals and dyads in their adaptive use of decision strategies
Individuals have been shown to adaptively select decision strategies depending on the environment structure. Two experiments extended this research to the group level. Subjects (N = 240) worked either individually or in...
Right-wing ideology and numeracy: A perception of greater ability, but poorer performance
Right-wing ideology and cognitive ability, including objective numeracy, have been found to relate negatively. Although objective and subjective numeracy correlate positively, it is unclear whether subjective numeracy re...