Understanding conjunction effects in probability judgments: the role of implicit mental models
✍ Scribed by Tilmann Betsch; Klaus Fiedler
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 167 KB
- Volume
- 29
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0046-2772
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Subjective probability judgments often violate a normative principle in that the conjunction of two events is judged to be more likely than the probability of either of the two events occurring separately. Most previous explanations of these conjunction eects have assumed that probability judgments depend on some psychological relation (e.g. representativeness) between the constituents mentioned explicitly in the stimulus information. In contrast, the present approach highlights the fundamental role of implicitly inferred information. Participants are assumed to transform the explicit stimulus information into implicit mental models in their attempt to make sense of the experimental task. Probability judgments should then re¯ect the degree of activation of such a mental model in memory given a set of propositions, rather than the quantitative ®t or likelihood of the propositions themselves. Two studies are reported which provide converging evidence for the proposed mental model approach. In the ®rst study, using graded conjunctions of one to ®ve propositions, probability judgments are shown to vary as a function of the activation of a mental model rather than the likelihood of the component events. In a second study, a priming procedure is employed to activate mental models that either ®t an event conjunction or do not, leading to an increase or decrease of conjunction eects in probability judgment.