An availability bias in professional judgment

When branches of a fault tree are pruned, subjects do not fully transfer the probability of those branches to the ‘all other’ category. This underestimation of the catch-all probability has been interpreted as an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ form of the availability bias. The present work replicates this underestimation bias with professional managers. It then demonstrates the effectiveness of a corrective tactic, extending the tree by generating additional causes, and also reveals that more easily retrieved short-term causes dominate the generation process. These results do not differ across managers' culture, education or experience. After evaluating such alternative explanations as category redefinition, we conclude that availability is a major cause, though possibly not the sole cause, of the underestimation bias.     

Likelihoodism,Bayesianism, and relational confirmation

Likelihoodists and Bayesians seem to have a fundamental disagreement about the proper probabilistic explication of relational (or contrastive) conceptions of evidential support (or confirmation). In this paper, I will survey some recent arguments and results in this area, with an eye toward pinpointing the nexus of the dispute. This will lead, first, to an important shift in the way the debate has been couched, and, second, to an alternative explication of relational support, which is in some sense a “middle way” between Likelihoodism and Bayesianism. In the process, I will propose some new work for an old probability puzzle: the “Monty Hall” problem. Thanks to the participants of the Philosophy, Probability, and Modeling (PPM) Seminar at the University of Konstanz (especially Stephan Hartmann, Franz Huber, Wolfgang Spohn, and Teddy Seidenfeld), for a very fruitful discussion of an early draft of this paper in July, 2004. Since then, discussions and correspondences with Prasanta Bandyopadhyay, Luc Bovens, Alan Hájek, Jim Hawthorne, Jim Joyce, Jon Kvanvig (and other participants of his “Certain Doubts” blog, which had a thread on a previous draft of this paper), Patrick Maher, Sherri Roush, Richard Royall, Elliott Sober, Dan Steel, and an anonymous referee of Synthese has been very valuable.     

Arguing about the likelihood of consequences: Laypeople's criteria to distinguish strong arguments from weak ones

High-quality arguments have strong and lasting persuasive effects, suggesting that people can distinguish high- from low-quality arguments. However, we know little of what norms people employ to make that distinction. Some studies have shown that, in evaluating arguments from consequences, people are more sensitive to differences with respect to the desirability of these consequences than to differences in the likelihood that these consequences will occur. This raises the question of whether people lack the criteria to distinguish high-quality from low-quality arguments in support of such claims. In an experiment, 196 participants without any training in argument theory rated their acceptance of 30 claims about the likelihood that a certain outcome would result from a certain action. These claims were supported by an argument from authority, or from cause to effect, or from example. Arguments were systematically manipulated to violate nine specific criteria. For seven out of the nine criteria violation decreased acceptance of the claim supported. These findings show that people can use argument type specific criteria to distinguish high- from low-quality arguments.     

Assessment of dispositional forgiveness in adolescence: a contribution to the Italian validation of the Forgiveness Likelihood Scale

ABSTRACT

The current study investigated the factor structure, factorial invariance, and reliability of the Italian version of the Forgiveness Likelihood Scale (FLS) among 604 adolescents in Italy (217 boys and 387 girls) with a mean age of 16.6 years (SD?=?1.3). The FLS is a 10-item Likert-type scale created to assess the predisposition to forgive across situations. The sample was randomly split into two subsamples to investigate the FLS structure. Results indicated a unidimensional structure, and factorial invariance was found for the factor solution across gender. Scale reliability was adequate, revealing appropriate internal consistency (α?=?.75). Evidence for convergent validity was also found. The results suggested that the Italian version of the FLS can be reliably used to measure forgiveness among Italian adolescents. Practice implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Two-sample models with monotonic likelihood ratios for ordinal regression

Signal detection experiments with human observers frequently generate ordinal data which are evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) methods. These methods may include regressing a continuous two-distribution model to the data set. Because we assume that human observers will not systematically select observations absent the signal, this model should have a monotonic likelihood ratio between the distributions. This paper gives a general method for constructing pairs of distributions that have monotonic likelihood ratios and a possibly large number flexible parameters. It suggests two specific simple parametric forms of monotonic likelihood ratios, constructs new distributions with those likelihood ratios using other standard distributions, and performs ordinal regression with those new distributions to model some example data from the literature.     

Excessive confidence in visually-based estimates

People exhibit excessive confidence in visually-based estimates, which in turn biases decision making. Three experiments support this assertion. Experiment 1 shows a strong impact of presentation format on estimation of proportions. Experiment 2 shows that people rely on these erroneous estimates to make incentive-compatible decisions even when objective information can be easily obtained. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the biased decisions disappear when confidence in visually-based estimates is called into question by the perceived complexity of the stimulus.     

Modeling differentiation of cognitive abilities within the higher-order factor model using moderated factor analysis

Receptive foreign language proficiency is usually measured with reading and listening comprehension tasks. A novel approach to assess such proficiencies – viewing comprehension – is based on the presentation of short instructional videos followed by one or more comprehension questions concerning the preceding video stimulus. In order to evaluate a newly developed viewing comprehension test 485 German high school students completed reading, listening, and viewing comprehension tests, all measuring the receptive proficiency in English as a foreign language. Fluid and crystallized intelligence were measured as predictors of performance. Relative to traditional comprehension tasks, the viewing comprehension task has similar psychometric qualities. The three comprehension tests are very highly but not perfectly correlated with each other. Relations with fluid and crystallized intelligence show systematic differences between the three comprehension tasks. The high overlap between foreign language comprehension measures and between crystallized intelligence and language comprehension ability can be taken as support for a uni-dimensional interpretation. Implications for the assessment of language proficiency are discussed.     

Hindsight bias redefined: It’s about time

Four experiments introduced a new conceptual and methodological approach to hindsight bias, traditionally defined as the tendency to exaggerate the a priori predictability of outcomes after they become known. By examining likelihood estimates rooted to specific time points during an unfolding event sequence (videos and short text stories), judged both in foresight and hindsight, we conceptualized hindsight bias as a contrast between two “inevitability curves,” which plotted likelihood against time. Taking timing into account, we defined three new indicators of accuracy: linear accuracy (how well hindsight judgments capture the linear trend of foresight judgments over time), rate accuracy (how well hindsight judgments reflect the slope of foresight judgments over time), and temporal accuracy (how well hindsight judgments specify the overall timing of the full envelope of foresight judgments). Results demonstrated that hindsight judgments showed linear and rate accuracy, but were biased only in terms of lack of temporal accuracy. The oft-used catchphrase “knew it all along effect” was found to be a misnomer, in that participants were well aware in hindsight that their earlier foresight judgments reflected uncertainty. The current research therefore points to one way in which retrospective judgments can be considered biased, yet simultaneously suggests that considerable accuracy exists when people render such judgments.     

A Meta‐Analysis of the ELM's Argument Quality × Processing Type Predictions

One of the key dual‐process model predictions is that audiences will be more persuaded by strong persuasive arguments than weak and that this difference in persuasiveness will be larger when they are processing centrally rather than peripherally. A series of meta‐analyses were conducted (k = 134) to assess this claim and explore moderators. The data were generally consistent with the hypothesized interaction. The effects tended to be smaller when pre‐post designs were used rather than post‐test only. Assessments of the strength of the inductions did not tend to be associated with the size of the effects associated with those inductions.     

选购两难中折衷效应的发生规律

当人们置身于两难困境时,折衷策略是一个合理的解决方案。研究者分析选购两难中消费者的信息处理与折衷效应的关系。研究发现：选购两难中信息的低精致化处理更易导致折衷效应,产品涉入贡献于精致化处理从而抑制折衷效应,产品的认知相似性和情感抑制精致化处理从而促进折衷效应。研究结果表明,当消费者面对选购两难时,信息的精致化程度和心理水平影响他对于中性产品的选择。