Score blending: How scale response grouping biases perceived standing

Numerical values—from test scores to credit scores—inform us of our relative standing and can shape our decisions. The values are usually presented in a continuous format (which places scores on a single line) or a grouped format (which separates scores into several score groups). We investigate whether and how the presentation format affects one's perception of their standing in a distribution and subsequent decision making. We show that when values are grouped, individuals merge the values within each group, a phenomenon we term score blending, which leads to an underweighting of intragroup score shifts and an overweighting of intergroup score shifts. Across six studies (N = 2,108) and a variety of paradigms (e.g., test taking and financial decision making), we observe robust effects of score blending, even when score groups are explicitly described as meaningless and generated randomly. The effect persists when the score is merely recalled without the scale present and can bias key decision parameters with behavioral consequences.     

A Primate Dictionary? Decoding the Function and Meaning of Another Species' Vocalizations

Decoding the function and meaning of a foreign culture's sounds and gestures is a notoriously difficult problem. It is even more challenging when we think about the sounds and gestures of nonhuman animals. This essay provides a review of what is currently known about the informational content and function of primate vocalizations, emphasizing the problems underlying the construction of a primate “dictionary.” In contrast to the Oxford English Dictionary, this dictionary provides entries to emotional expressions as well as potentially referential expressions. It therefore represents a guide to what animals do with their vocalizations, as well as how they are represented by signalers and perceivers. I begin by a discussion of the unit problem, of how an acoustic space is carved up into functionally significant components leading to a species‐specific repertoire or lexicon of sorts. This section shows how little we know about the units of organization within animal vocal repertoires, and how such lack of information constrains our ability to tackle the problem of syntactic structure. In Section III, I review research on the production and perception of vocal signals that appear to be functionally referential. This work shows that several nonhuman primates produce vocalizations that share some of the key properties of reference, but certainly not all; the components that are missing raises questions about their role as precursors to human words. In Section IV, I explore the social uses of vocalizations, assessing whether the signal contains sufficient information for listeners to judge a caller's credibility; ultimately, caller credibility determines how receivers select an appropriate response. Results show that individuals can use calls to assess whether someone is reliable or unreliable, and that such attributes are associated with individuals and particular contexts. I conclude by synthesizing the issues presented and then raise some directions for future conceptual and methodological progress.     

On the Proper Interpretation and Impact of the AHP Axiom of Independence in Single-Criterion and Multiple-Criteria Problems

Some authors have proposed that the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) axiom of independence be relaxed to accommodate observations drawn from (a) examples of pairwise comparisons of alternatives in clusters in single-criterion AHP problems and (b) examples of problems in which the criteria have the same underlying measurement and both the achievement of the goal and the alternatives are measured objectively. We show that the illustrations given are actually single-criterion problems according to the AHP. Thus the AHP axiom of independence is inapplicable in both situations and therefore not violated. We also consider the consequence of failure to distinguish between a criterion as an attribute of alternatives and cluster of alternatives, the two being different in the hierarchic structure. Finally, we discuss transformable problems, which look like multicriteria problems but are actually single-criterion problems, and how failure to recognize this fact may lead to incorrect syntheses and false conclusions.