Partition priming in judgment under uncertainty.

Full Abstract

We show that likelihood judgments are biased toward an ignorance-prior probability that assigns equal credence to each mutually exclusive event considered by the judge. The value of the ignorance prior depends crucially on how the set of possibilities (i.e., the state space) is subjectively partitioned by the judge. For instance, asking "what is the probability that Sunday will be hotter than any other day next week?" facilitates a two-fold case partition, [Sunday hotter, Sunday not hotter], thus priming an ignorance prior of 1/2. In contrast, asking "what is the probability that the hottest day of the week will be Sunday?" facilitates a seven-fold class partition, [Sunday hottest, Monday hottest, etc.], priming an ignorance prior of 1/7. In four studies, we observed systematic partition dependence:
Judgments made by participants presented with either case or class formulations of the same query were biased toward the corresponding ignorance prior.

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Author information

Author/s: Fox, Craig R (CR); Rottenstreich, Yuval (Y);

Affiliation: Anderson School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles, 90095-1481, USA. craig.fox(-atsign-)anderson.ucla.edu

Journal and publication information

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

Journal: Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS (Psychol Sci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-May; vol 14 (issue 3) : pp 195-200

Dates: Created 2003/05/13; Completed 2003/08/05; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12741740, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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

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