WHAT YOU SEE IS ALL THERE IS
WHAT YOU SEE IS ALL THERE IS
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DOI：
10.1093/qje/qjaa012
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发表时间：
2020-08-01
影响因子：
13.7
通讯作者：
Enke, Benjamin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Enke, Benjamin
新闻报道和传播本质上受到空间、时间和注意力的限制。因此，新闻来源经常根据信号与受众先验信念之间的相似性来决定是否分享一条信息，这会产生样本选择问题。本文通过实验研究人们如何在这些背景下形成信念，特别是统计推理错误背后的机制。我记录了相当一部分实验参与者遵循简单的“所见即所得”启发式，根据该启发式，参与者只考虑他们面前的信息，并直接使用样本均值来估计总体均值。一系列旨在识别机制的治疗表明，对于许多参与者来说，未观察到的信号甚至不会浮现在脑海中。我提供的因果证据表明，此类错误心理模型的频率是决策问题的计算复杂性的函数。这些结果指出了脑海中浮现出的内容的上下文依赖性以及由此产生的信念更新错误。
News reports and communication are inherently constrained by space, time, and attention. As a result, news sources often condition the decision of whether to share a piece of information on the similarity between the signal and the prior belief of the audience, which generates a sample selection problem. This article experimentally studies how people form beliefs in these contexts, in particular the mechanisms behind errors in statistical reasoning. I document that a substantial fraction of experimental participants follows a simple "what you see is all there is" heuristic, according to which participants exclusively consider information that is right in front of them, and directly use the sample mean to estimate the population mean. A series of treatments aimed at identifying mechanisms suggests that for many participants, unobserved signals do not even come to mind. I provide causal evidence that the frequency of such incorrect mental models is a function of the computational complexity of the decision problem. These results point to the context dependence of what comes to mind and the resulting errors in belief updating.