On the influence of rarity on contingency judgments - Implications for the formation of prejudice and Bayesian models of human judgment

稀有性对偶然性判断的影响——对偏见形成和人类判断的贝叶斯模型的影响

• 批准号: 222017720
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Florian Luitpold Wilhelm Kutzner
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Warwick Business School
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Fellowships
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2011-12-31 至 2012-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/222017720?language=en
• 关键词: influence; rarity; contingency; judgments; Implications

Accurate contingency judgments allow to develop causal explanations and to predict the future. Human contingency judgments are, nonetheless, consistently at variance with statistical indices. Research shows that judgments mainly depend on the presence of aspects, while statistical indices require taking their absence into account as well. For example, in judging the contingency between migraine and stress, days characterized by stress and migraine (features present) have a stronger impact on judgments than days without (features absent). At the same time, social cognition research shows that rare aspects have a stronger influence on stereotypic contingency judgments than frequent aspects. In the present proposal, it is investigated whether the perception of rarity can also account for the differential effect of present versus absent features. Four experiments and a meta-analysis are proposed that study the influence of two cues to rarity: linguistic quantifiers like „rare“ or „frequent“ and the type of an aspects, i.e. whether an aspects is perceived as „feature“ (present or absent) or as „dimension“ (always present to varying degrees). The hypothesis is tested that the presence of an aspect is perceived as less frequent than its absence and therefore has a stronger impact on contingency judgments. If indeed cues to rarity change how contingencies are judged, this would have intriguing theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, influences of rarity are captured within a Bayesian approach to contingency judgments, therefore offering a more adequate descriptive model for human contingency judgments than traditional statistics. Practically, this research might help frame communication about social minorities in a way that minimizes their association with rare, usually negative, attributes.

准确的偶然性判断允许发展因果解释和预测未来。然而，人类的偶然性判断始终与统计指数不一致。研究表明，判断主要依靠方面的存在，而统计指标也需要考虑方面的不存在。例如，在判断偏头痛和压力之间的偶然性时，有压力和偏头痛的日子（特征存在）比没有偏头痛的日子（特征不存在）对判断的影响更大。同时，社会认知研究表明，罕见方面对刻板印象权变判断的影响强于频繁方面。在本提案中，研究了稀有度的感知是否也可以解释存在与不存在特征的差异效应。提出了四个实验和一个元分析，研究了两个线索对稀缺性的影响：语言量词如“罕见”或“频繁”和一个方面的类型，即一个方面是否被视为“特征”（存在或不存在）或“维度”（总是不同程度地存在）。这个假设被证明，一个方面的存在被认为比它的不存在更少，因此对权变判断有更大的影响。如果稀有的线索确实改变了对偶然性的判断，这将具有有趣的理论和实践意义。从理论上讲，贝叶斯方法在偶然性判断中捕捉到了稀缺性的影响，因此为人类偶然性判断提供了比传统统计更充分的描述性模型。实际上，这项研究可能有助于构建关于社会少数群体的交流框架，从而最大限度地减少他们与罕见的、通常是负面的属性的联系。