Two sides of the same coin: Information processing style and reverse biases
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2011, Vol 6, Issue 4
Abstract
This paper examines the effect of information processing styles (indexed by the Rational-Experiential Inventory of Pacini & Epstein, 1999) on adherence to bias judgments, and particularly to reverse biases; i.e., when two choice questions that comprise identical normative components are set in different situations and yield seemingly opposite behavioral biases. We found consistent evidence for a negative correlation between rational score and adherence to reverse biases, as well as overall biases, for all three pairs of reverse biases tested. Further, this effect of rational thinking was more pronounced for high experiential individuals, in that high-rational and high-experiential participants committed fewer biases than all other participants. These results lend weight to our claim that low-rational individuals, who are more sensitive to the context, are more prone to utilize some attribute of the provided information when it is uncalled for, but at the same time tend to ignore it or give it too little weight when it is a crucial factor in a normative decision process.
Authors and Affiliations
Shahar Ayal, Guy Hochman and Dan Zakay
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677800
- DOI -
- Views 127
- Downloads 0
Response dynamics: A new window on the decision process
The history of judgment and decision making is defined by a trend toward increasingly nuanced explanations of the decision making process. Recently, process models have become incredibly sophisticated, yet the tools avai...
Professionally biased: Evidence for misestimations of driving speed, journey time and time-savings among taxi and car drivers
People make systematic and predictable mistakes regarding estimations of average speed and journey time. In addition, people have been shown to commit a time-saving bias by underestimating the time that can be saved when...
The recognition heuristic: A decade of research
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 i...
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...
Post-error recklessness and the hot hand
Although post-error slowing and the “hot hand” (streaks of good performance) are both types of sequential dependencies arising from the differential influence of success and failure, they have not previously been studied...