Fast and frugal framing effects?

Three experiments examine whether simple pair-wise comparison judgments, involving the “recognition heuristic” (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002), are sensitive to implicit cues to the nature of the comparison required. Experiments 1 & 2 show that participants frequently choose the recognized option of a pair if asked to make “larger” judgments but are significantly less likely to choose the unrecognized option when asked to make “smaller” judgments. Experiment 3 demonstrates that, overall, participants consider recognition to be a more reliable guide to judgments of a magnitude criterion than lack of recognition and that this intuition drives the framing effect. These results support the idea that, when making pair-wise comparison judgments, inferring that the recognized item is large is simpler than inferring that the unrecognized item is small

Time to decide? Simplicity and congruity in comparative judgment

What is the relationship between magnitude judgments relying on directly available characteristics versus probabilistic cues? Question frame was manipulated in a comparative judgment task previously assumed to involve inference across a probabilistic mental model (e.g., “which city is largest” – the “larger” question – versus “which city is smallest” – the “smaller” question). Participants identified either the largest or smallest city (Experiments 1a, 2) or the richest or poorest person (Experiment 1b) in a three-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) task (Experiment 1) or 2-AFC task (Experiment 2). Response times revealed an interaction between question frame and the number of options recognized. When asked the smaller question, response times were shorter when none of the options were recognized. The opposite pattern was found when asked the larger question: response time was shorter when all options were recognized. These task-stimuli congruity results in judgment under uncertainty are consistent with, and predicted by, theories of magnitude comparison which make use of deductive inferences from declarative knowledge

Hans Eysenck and the Jewish question: Genealogical investigations

We present evidence establishing that Hans Eysenck was half Jewish. He went out of his way to conceal this fact and to disavow his Jewish ancestry until the publication of his full-length autobiography in 1990, long after he retired, when he revealed that one of his grandparents was Jewish. Using specialized genealogical techniques and resources, we trace his Jewish maternal grandmother, who died in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944, and his Jewish maternal grandfather, who practised medicine in Königshütte and later in Berlin. We discuss Eysenck’s possible motives for disavowing his Jewish heritage for most of his life

Causes, Enablers and the Law

Many theories in philosophy, law, and psychology, make no distinction in meaning between causing and enabling conditions. Yet, psychologically people readily make such distinctions each day. In this paper we report three experiments, showing that individuals distinguish between causes and enabling conditions in brief descriptions of wrongful outcomes. Respondents rate actions that bring about outcomes as causes, and actions that make possible the causal relation as enablers. Likewise, causers (as opposed to enablers) are rated as more responsible for the outcome, as liable to longer prison sentences, and as liable to pay higher fines. Moreover, the more actors involved, the more blame volume there is psychologically to be apportioned between them. The implication is that theories and the law in practice, both criminal and civil, may dangerously mismatch the intuitions of those to whom they are supposed to apply. The findings are discussed in light of contemporary psychological theories of how people reason about cause. The paper presents the extended findings supplementary to the conference paper: Frosch, C. A., Johnson-Laird, P. N., Cowley, M. (2007). Don’t blame me your Honor, I’m only the enabler. Proceedings of the Twenty–Ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, p. 1755, Mahweh, N. J: Erlbaum. Nashville, USA. *Main findings now cited in the Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning