The influence of hierarchy on probability judgment.

Full Abstract

Consider the task of predicting which soccer team will win the next World Cup. The bookmakers may judge Brazil to be the team most likely to win, but also judge it most likely that a European rather than a Latin American team will win. This is an example of a non-aligned hierarchy structure:
the most probable event at the subordinate level (Brazil wins) appears to be inconsistent with the most probable event at the superordinate level (a European team wins). In this paper we exploit such structures to investigate how people make predictions based on uncertain hierarchical knowledge. We distinguish between aligned and non-aligned environments, and conjecture that people assume alignment. Participants were exposed to a non-aligned training set in which the most probable superordinate category predicted one outcome, whereas the most probable subordinate category predicted a different outcome. In the test phase participants allowed their initial probability judgments about category membership to shift their final ratings of the probability of the outcome, even though all judgments were made on the basis of the same statistical data. In effect people were primed to focus on the most likely path in an inference tree, and neglect alternative paths. These results highlight the importance of the level at which statistical data are represented, and suggest that when faced with hierarchical inference problems people adopt a simplifying heuristic that assumes alignment.

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Author information

Author/s: Lagnado, David A (DA); Shanks, David R (DR);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London, UK. d.lagnado(-atsign-)ucl.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Cognition (Cognition), published in Netherlands. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Sep; vol 89 (issue 2) : pp 157-78

Dates: Created 2003/08/13; Completed 2003/10/29; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12915299, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Humans
Judgment

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