Why do people fail to consider alternative hypotheses in judgments under uncertainty?

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition Consider the Alternative: The Effects of Causal Knowledge on Representing and Using Alternative Hypotheses in Judgments Under Uncertainty

The poverty of media richness theory: explaining people's choice of electronic mail vs. voice mail

How and why people choose which communication medium to use is an important issue for both behavioral researchers and software product developers. Little is yet known about how and why people in organizations choose among new media like electronic mail and voice mail, although the availability and use of new media are increasing dramatically. Media richness theory (MRT) is the most prominent, i...

Reconciling intuitive physics and Newtonian mechanics for colliding objects.

People have strong intuitions about the influence objects exert upon one another when they collide. Because people's judgments appear to deviate from Newtonian mechanics, psychologists have suggested that people depend on a variety of task-specific heuristics. This leaves open the question of how these heuristics could be chosen, and how to integrate them into a unified model that can explain h...

Polymorphism of Human Judgment under Uncertainty

The aim of this paper is to test if conjunctive and disjunctive judgments are differently accounted for possibility and probability theories depending on whether (1) judgments are made on a verbal or a numerical scale, (2) the plausibility of elementary hypotheses is low or high. 72 subjects had to rate the extent to which they believe that two characters were individually, in conjunction or in...

AFFECT PROBABILITY JUDGMENT ? THE DISCRIMINATION BIAS Amber Sprenger

Title of thesis: CAN IRRELEVANT ALTERNATIVES AFFECT PROBABILITY JUDGMENT? THE DISCRIMINATION BIAS Amber Sprenger, Master of Science, 2005 Thesis directed by: Professor Michael Dougherty Department of Psychology In this paper we used a proactive interference (PI) paradigm to examine the effect of generating irrelevant alternative hypotheses on probability judgments. Two possible effects of gener...