Fluency as a Substitute for Validity in Cue Selection

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When making judgments, people typically use a variety of cues. For example, a legal case may involve a number of pieces of evidence that jurors could use to judge guilt or innocence. Similarly, a patient may exhibit multiple symptoms that can help a doctor diagnosis an ailment. Some cues are more likely than others to successfully predict an outcome and many previous models have assumed that people give more weight to more valid cues. However, it is not always obvious which cues are the most valid, and the use of cue validity for cue weighting is relatively implausible on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This project proposes that cue weighting may be based on fluency rather than validity. By fluency, we mean the ease with which information is processed. Fluency has been shown to be an important cognitive tool in many domains, because people always have access to their own fluency experiences, and fluency is correlated with so many things. In particular, cue fluency likely to be correlated with cue validity, because of the basic cognitive mechanisms of associative learning and priming. Therefore fluency is both a cognitively plausible and ecologically valid mechanism for cue weighting. This project uses a wide array of converging paradigms to explore this possibility.