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Note on the rationality of rule‐based versus exemplar‐based processing in human judgment
Author(s) -
Juslin Peter,
Olsson Henrik
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2004.00376.x
Subject(s) - overconfidence effect , psychology , rationality , transitive relation , cognitive bias , cognitive psychology , social psychology , cognition , econometrics , mathematics , epistemology , philosophy , combinatorics , neuroscience
This paper reports a study of the relationship between rule‐ versus exemplar‐based processing and criteria for rationality of judgment. Participants made probability judgments in a classification task devised by S. W. Allen and L. R. Brooks (1991). In the exemplar condition, the miscalibration was accounted for by stochastic components of the judgment with a format‐dependence effect, implying simultaneous over‐ and underconfidence depending on the response scale. In the rule condition, there was an overconfidence bias not accounted for by the stochastic components of judgment. In both conditions the participants were additive on average and reasonably transitive, but the larger stochastic component in the exemplar condition produced somewhat larger absolute deviations. The results suggest that exemplar processes are unbiased but more perturbed by stochastic components, while rule‐based processes may be more prone to bias.