The Role of Memory Retrieval in Probability Judgment

记忆提取在概率判断中的作用人们经常对自己对一般知识公式的答案过于自信(例如，黑猩猩的妊娠期是比人类长还是短)。有充分的证据表明，“现实世界”的判断，比如医生对心肌梗死的诊断，在类似的情况下往往不太理想。这项拟议的研究旨在进一步发展和检验最近提出的一个模型，该模型认为，人们如何产生与不同判断情况有关的论点的特点导致判断不足。这项研究有望进一步阐明产生更好判断的程序。“论据招募模型”提出，人们很少会根据几个以上的事实或论据来做出判断。当它们确实从记忆中唤起了多个论点时，后来在这个过程中检索到的论点往往只支持前面提出的那些论点。该模型预测，如果从记忆中提取事实的数量和“余额”发生变化，判断能力应该得到改善。因此，本研究要探索的主要操作是要求研究参与者在做出判断之前回忆他们所能回忆的所有相关事实(例如，类似的先前事件)。如果这种要求倾向于减少参与者判断中明显的过度自信，将表明对该模型的支持。

9911301Yates, J. Frank The Role of Memory Retrieval in Probability Judgment People are often overconfident about their answers to general knowledgequestions (e.g. whether chimpanzees have longer or shorter gestationperiods than humans). And there is ample evidence that "real world"judgments, such as physicians' diagnoses of myocardial infarction, areoften less than ideal in a similar way. The proposed research is intendedto further develop and test a recently proposed model which asserts thatfeatures of how people bring to mind ("recruit") arguments pertinent to agiven judgment situation lead to deficient judgment. This research isfurther anticipated to illuminate procedures that yield improvedjudgments. The "argument recruitment model" proposes that people rarelybase their judgments on more than a few facts or arguments. And when theydo bring to mind multiple arguments from memory, the ones retrieved laterin the process tend only to support those presented earlier. The modelpredicts that judgment should be improved if the amounts and "balance" ofretrieval of facts from memory are changed. Thus, the primarymanipulation to be explored in this research is that of requesting studyparticipants to recall all of the relevant facts (e.g., similar previouscases) they can prior to rendering their judgments. Support for the modelwill be indicated to the extent that such demands tend to reduce theoverconfidence evident in participants' judgments.