Citation

Richter T, Späth P. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 2006; 32(1): 150-162.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Koln, Germany. tobias.richter@uni-koeln.de

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/0278-7393.32.1.150

PMID

16478347

Abstract

Three experiments with paired comparisons were conducted to test the non-compensatory character of the recognition heuristic (D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002) in judgment and decision making. Recognition and knowledge about the recognized alternative were manipulated. In Experiment 1, participants were presented pairs of animal names where the task was to select the animal with the larger population. In Experiment 2, participants chose the safer 1 out of 2 airlines, and 3 knowledge cues were varied simultaneously. Recognition effects were partly compensated by task-relevant knowledge. The compensatory effects were additive. Decisions were slower when recognition and knowledge were incongruent. In Experiment 3, compensatory effects of knowledge and recognition were found for the city-size task which had originally been used to demonstrate the non-compensatory character of the recognition heuristic. These results suggest that recognition information is not used in an all-or-none fashion but is integrated with other types of knowledge in judgment and decision making.

Language: en