Selective attribution and the judgment of causality

Four experiments used a video game procedure to investigate the mechanism by which people are sensitive to the degree of contingency between two events. Subjects were presented with sets of trials on each of which they could perform a particular action and observe whether the action produced a particular outcome in a situation in which there was an alternative potential cause of the outcome. The experiments attempted to show that the process of selective attribution operates during exposure to a particular contingency and mediates the contingency judgment. In Experiment 1 the impact of outcomes occurring in the absence of the action was reduced by changing the location at which outcomes occurred following the action. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and showed that it was not due to simple changes in temporal contiguity, but rather was due to affecting the process of selective attribution. In Experiment 3 judgments were shown to increase when outcomes occurring in the absence of the action, outcomes which otherwise would reduce judgments of action-outcome contingency, were signaled. Finally, in Experiment 4 this effect was replicated, and in addition it was shown that the signaling effect is not simply due to the presence of the signal. For the effect to be shown, the signal must occur when the outcome occurs in the absence of the action.     

Response system processes in absolute judgment

Consistent relationships are found between Ss′ absolute judgments of the value of a stimulus and the previous sequence of both stimuli and responses. The form and magnitude of these sequential effects are shown to depend on the presence or absence of feedback and on task difficulty. The pattern of the sequential effects found allows the conclusion that they are due to purely response-system processes. A two-stage model of the judgment process is proposed, and it is argued that observed assimilative effects account for the central tendency effects observed in category judgments.     

Comparison and expectancy processes in human judgment

This work explored a judgment model proposed by Manis and Paskewitz (1984a). The model suggests that prior experience with the members of a given category affects the assessment of other category members in 2 ways: (a) by providing a basis for comparison and (b) by leading the judge to expect that new exemplars will resemble those previously encountered. In 4 experiments, respondents judged the height of different people on the basis of full-length photographs. The height of the models in an induction series constituted the main independent variable. The effects of contrasting inductions (e.g., short vs. tall women) affected the judges' subsequent assessments in a test series. Both comparison and expectancy processes played a significant role, sometimes opposing one another and sometimes acting in parallel (i.e., supporting one another).     

Explicit and implicit processes in multicue judgment

In two experiments, a multicue probability learning task was used to train participants in relating judgments to a criterion, on the basis of several cues that could or could not be relevant. The outcome feedback had 25% added noise to simulate real-world experience-based learning. Judgmental strategies acquired were measured by individual multiple linear regression analyses of a test phase (with no feedback) and were compared with self-ratings of cue relevance. In a third experiment, participants were instructed explicitly on cue relevance, with no training phase. The pattern of results suggested that both implicit and explicit cognitive processes influenced judgments and that they may have been sensitive to different task manipulations in the learning phase. On more complex tasks, despite weak explicit learning, explicit processes continued to influence judgments, producing a decrement in performance. These findings explain why studies of expert judgment often show only moderate levels of self-insight, since people have only partial access to the processes determining their judgments.     

Effect of local context of responding on human judgment of causality

Two experiments examined the effect of various relationships between a response (pressing the space bar of a computer) and an outcome (a triangle flashing on a screen) on judgments of the causal effectiveness of the response. In Experiment 1, when responses were required to be temporarily isolated from each other prior to an outcome, ratings of the causal effectiveness of the responses were higher than in a condition in which the probability of an outcome following a response was the same but in which no temporal isolation was required. In Experiment 2, when a number of responses were required to be emitted temporally close to the outcome, ratings of the causal effectiveness of the responses were lower than in a condition in which the probability of an outcome following a response was the same but in which no temporal proximity was required. These results suggest that, in addition to the overall probability that an outcome will follow a response, the local context of responding at the time an outcome is presented is critical in influencing ratings of causal effectiveness.     

Accountability and judgment processes in a personality prediction task

In this experiment, we investigated the impact of accountability--social pressures to justify one's views to others--on cognitive processing in a personality-prediction task. Subjects were presented with the responses of actual test-takers to 16 items from Jackson's Personality Research Form (PRF) and asked to predict how these individuals responded to an additional set of 16 items from the same test. Subjects were assigned to a no-accountability condition (they learned that all of their responses would be anonymous), a preexposure-accountability condition (they learned of the need to justify their responses before seeing the test-takers' PRF responses), and a postexposure-accountability condition (they learned of the need to justify their responses after seeing the test-takers' PRF responses). Preexposure-accountability subjects reported more integratively complex impressions of test-takers, made more accurate behavioral predictions, and reported more appropriate levels of confidence in their predictions than did either no-accountability or postexposure-accountability subjects. We conclude by considering possible psychological mediators of these effects as well as the broader theoretical implications of the findings for the development of contingency models of judgment and choice.     

Comparison processes in social judgment: mechanisms and consequences

This article proposes an informational perspective on comparison consequences in social judgment. It is argued that to understand the variable consequences of comparison, one has to examine what target knowledge is activated during the comparison process. These informational underpinnings are conceptualized in a selective accessibility model that distinguishes 2 fundamental comparison processes. Similarity testing selectively makes accessible knowledge indicating target-standard similarity, whereas dissimilarity testing selectively makes accessible knowledge indicating target-standard dissimilarity. These respective subsets of target knowledge build the basis for subsequent target evaluations, so that similarity testing typically leads to assimilation whereas dissimilarity testing typically leads to contrast. The model is proposed as a unifying conceptual framework that integrates diverse findings on comparison consequences in social judgment.     

Selectional restrictions,types and categories

The expressions of a language distinguish between many different types of objects. These types can affect how the meanings of these expressions combine. This paper provides a formal picture of the process of meaning combination in a richly typed framework.     

Episodic and semantic knowledge in emotional self-report: evidence for two judgment processes

Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Support for 2 distinct judgment strategies was based on judgment latencies (Studies 1 and 2) and priming paradigms (Studies 2 and 3). The authors suggest that self-reports of emotion over short versus long time frames assess qualitatively different sources of self-knowledge.     

Judgment processes in motivation: Anchoring and adjustment effects on judgment and behavior

The behavioral correlates of human judgment have received little attention from judgment and decision making researchers. One behavioral domain that provides for the study of judgment-behavior relations is task motivation (i.e., the allocation of time and effort to a task). Judgments of contingent relations are primary components of several theories of motivation, including expectancy theories and the theory of behavior in organizations proposed by Naylor, Pritchard, and Ilgen (1980). The characteristics of heuristic judgment processes are hypothesized to affect contingency judgments and thus behavioral allocations of time and effort. This paper examines the effects of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic upon (a) judgments of future effort and performance and (b) upon actual allocations of time and effort using several types of anchoring information. Results indicate that both irrelevant and relevant information have strong anchoring effects on effort and performance judgments, but do not have concomitant effects on behavior. Implications for the role of judgment in motivation and for the link between judgment and behavior are discussed.     

Individuals and dyads in a multiple-cue judgment task: Cognitive processes and performance

Virtually all studies of multiple-cue judgment focus on the learning by individuals. In a multiple-cue judgment task the authors examined if people acquire rule or exemplar knowledge as a function of learning the task alone or in dyads. Learning in dyads was expected to promote explicit rule-based thinking as a consequence of verbalization (social abstraction effect) and to improve performance due to the larger joint exemplar knowledge base (exemplar pooling effect). In two experiments the results suggest more accurate judgment by dyads, evidence for an exemplar pooling effect, but no evidence for the social abstraction effect. In contrast to most previous research, social interaction proved beneficial and allowed the dyads to surpass their combined individual performance.     

Cue interaction and judgments of causality: Contributions of causal and associative processes

In four experiments, the predictions made by causal model theory and the Rescorla-Wagner model were tested by using a cue interaction paradigm that measures the relative response to a given event based on the influence or salience of an alternative event. Experiments 1 and 2 uncorrelated two variables that have typically been confounded in the literature (causal order and the number of cues and outcomes) and demonstrated that overall contingency judgments are influenced by the causal structure of the events. Experiment 3 showed that trial-by-trial prediction responses, a second measure of causal assessment, were not influenced by the causal structure of the described events. Experiment 4 revealed that participants became less sensitive to the influence of the causal structure in both their ratings and their predictions as trials progressed. Thus, two experiments provided evidence for high-level (causal reasoning) processes, and two experiments provided evidence for low-level (associative) processes. We argue that both factors influence causal assessment, depending on what is being asked about the events and participants' experience with those events.     

The need for process research on psychophysical judgment: comments on "Ratio and subtractive processes in psychophysical judgment" by Veit

This article is a commentary on Veit's article "Ratio and Subtractive Processes in Psychophysical Judgment." Veit's article makes an important contribution to the area of psychophysical judgment by providing a systematic approach that combines measurement and psychological theory. Using multi-factor designs and a cross-task scale-invariance criterion, Veit shows how to concurrently examine the integration rule, response-transformation function, and psychophysical function for judgment tasks. The need to expand this methodology to further understand the operations and processes underlying psychophysical judgment is stressed in the present article, and an illustration involving feedback mechanisms is provided.     

The interplay of memory and judgment processes in effects of aging on hindsight bias

Hindsight bias is the phenomenon that after people are presented with the correct answer to a question, their judgment regarding their own past answer to this question is biased toward the correct answer. In three experiments, younger and older adults gave numerical responses to general-knowledge questions and later attempted to recall their responses. For some questions, the correct answer was provided during recall (Experiment 1) or before recall (Experiments 2 and 3). Multinomial model-based analyses show age differences in both recollection bias and reconstruction bias when the correct judgment was in working memory during the recall phase. The authors discuss implications for theories of cognitive aging and theories of hindsight bias.     

The role of control processes and structural constraints in models of memory and social judgment

Six experiments examining a recent model of memory and social judgment are reported. In particular, the theoretical concept of a Work Space is examined in terms of both its structural properties and a variety of control processes that govern its operation. In Experiment 1, subjects were given information about a stimulus person and told that they would later be asked to recall it as well as possible. The length of the actual delay before recall and the length of the anticipated delay were factorially varied. Under short delay conditions, subjects anticipating a short delay recalled more of the information than those anticipating a long delay. The reverse was true under actual long delay conditions. Other results suggest that the anticipated length of the delay has an effect on processes related to both encoding and storage/retrieval. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate that, relative to no delay conditions, a long actual delay or a long anticipated delay produces polarization in social judgments. Both of these results are predicted by the model. Experiments 4–6 examine the effect of interpolated cognitive activity on memory and social judgment. As predicted by the model, relatively complicated cognitive activity leads to lower levels of recall and a greater polarization of judgments than less complicated intervening cognitive activity. It is argued that all of these results can be accounted for by the concept of a Work Space as a temporary repository devoted to the current information processing activities of the subject. It is thought that such a concept must be kept theoretically distinct from long-term memory. Implications of the results for models of memory and social judgment are discussed.     

Perceptual and cognitive processes in time-to-contact estimation: Analysis of prediction-motion and relative judgment tasks

Three classes of task appear to involve time-to-contact (TTC) information: coincidence anticipation (CA) tasks, relative judgment (RJ) tasks, and interceptive actions (IAs). An important type of CA task used to study the perception of TTC is the prediction-motion (PM) task. The question of whether it is possible to study the perceptual processes involved in the timing of IAs using PM and RJ tasks is considered. A revised version of the tau hypothesis is proposed as an account of the perceptual information processing involved in the control of fast IAs. This draws on the distinction between “motor” and “cognitive” visual systems. It is argued that task variables affect whether “cognitive” information processing is involved in performance and can determine whether TTC information is used at all. Evidence is reviewed that suggests that PM and RJ tasks involve cognitive processing. It is argued that target viewing time, TTC at response initiation, amount of practice, and whether there is a period between target disappearance and response are task variables that determine whether cognitive processing will influence responding.     

Social judgment processes in hyperactive boys: Effects of methylphenidate and comparisons with normal peers

Although there is consensus that ADHD children have serious social problems, there is little understanding of the mechanisms underlying or accompanying such problems. To examine the possibility of atypical or faulty social reasoning, we presented ADHD and normal boys with a social perception task that entailed evaluating the behaviors of unknown peers. ADHD judges participated under both methylphenidate and placebo conditions, and on each occasion they evaluated an unfamiliar ADHD target in each medication state. In contrast to placebo, methylphenidate appeared to dampen overall response rates in ADHD judges, but there was no effect on sensitivity to medication-related differences. Regardless of their own medication state, ADHD judges identified more undesirable behaviors in peers on placebo than in those taking methylphenidate. Judges with the most serious behavior problems tended to identify the greatest number of negative behaviors in peers, especially when both judge and target were unmedicated. There were no effects of target medication status on detections of positive behaviors and few differences in detection patterns of ADHD versus normal judges. Discussion focused on the need to distinguish general regulatory from specific social-cognitive processes.This study was conducted at the Fernald Child Study Center, UCLA, and we very much appreciate the many contributions of Stephen P. Hinshaw, codirector of the program. We are also grateful to the resourceful and devoted staff and the energetic children who served as judges and targets.