| Abstract: | The results reported herein support the hypotheses that (1) situation-specific, contextual features of a task can cause people to use explanation-based reasoning (Pennington and Hastie, 1993); (2) such reasoning can cause experienced personnel, both individually and in two-person teams, to reinterpret the meaning of the same information when it is presented in two different ordered sequences; and (3) the result will be primacy or recency (or no) effects depending on whether the most recent conflicting information can be explained away or not, respectively. These results extend the belief-adjustment model proposed by Hogarth and Einhorn (1992), which does not address information reinterpretations, and always predicts recency effects for an evaluation task with a short series of conflicting information. More generally, the results demonstrate the importance of situation-specific, contextual features in understanding judgment processes. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
