Spontaneous Discounting of Availability in Frequency Judgment Tasks
Tóm tắt
Discounting is a causal-reasoning phenomenon in which increasing confidence in the likelihood of a particular cause decreases confidence in the likelihood of all other causes. This article provides evidence that individuals apply discounting principles to making causal attributions about internal cognitive states. In particular, the three studies reported show that individuals will fail to use the availability heuristic in frequency estimations when salient causal explanations for availability exist. Experiment 1 shows that fame is used as a cue for discounting in estimates of surname frequency. Experiment 2 demonstrates that individuals discount the availability of their own last name. Experiment 3, which used individuals' initials in a letter-frequency estimation task, demonstrates that simple priming of alternative causal models leads to discounting of availability. Discounting of cognitive states can occur spontaneously, even when alternative causal models are never explicitly provided.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Bargh J.A., 1996, Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, 169
Bernstein D.M., 2002, Memory's free radicals: When recent events intrude upon autobiographical memory
Collister D., 2002, Making inference: An analysis of the roles of category association and representation in decision making
Eggen D., 2002, The Washington Post, A5
Goldstein D.G., 1999, Simple heuristics that make us smart, 37
Hastie R., 2000, Rational choice in an uncertain world
Oppenheimer D.M. (2003). Not so fast! (and not so frugal!): Rethinking the recognition heuristic. Cognition, 90, B1–B9.
Plous S., 1993, The psychology of judgment and decision making
U.S. Census Bureau. (2002). Name files. Retrieved February 17, 2002, from http://www.census.gov/genealogy/ http://www/namesearch.html