Abstract
Two lines of prior research into the conditions under which people seek information are examined in light of two statistical definitions of diagnosticity. Five experiments are reported. In two, subjects selected information in order to test a hypothesis. In the remaining three, they selected information in order to convince someone else of the truth of a known hypothesis. A total of 567 university students served as subjects. The two primary conclusions were as follows: (1) When the task is highly structured by the environment, subjects select information diagnostically, and (2) when the task is less structured, so that subjects must seek relevant information not manifest, they select information pseudodiagnostically. Possible relations to other laboratory inference tasks and to clinical judgment are discussed.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
]Arkes, H. R. (1981). Impediments to accurate clinical judgment and possible ways to minimize their impact.Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychologyit,49, 323–330.
Bar-Hillel, M. (1990). Back to base rates. In R. M. Hogarth (Ed.), Insights in decision making (pp. 200–216). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Beyth-Marom, R. (1990). Mis/understanding diagnosticity: Direction and magnitude of change. In K. Borcherding, O. I.. Larichev, & D. M. Messick (Eds.), Contemporary issues in decision making (pp. 203–221). Amsterdam: Elsevier, North-Holland.
]Beyth-Marom, R., &Fischhoff, B. (1983). Diagnosticity and pseudodiagnosticity.Journal of Personality & Social Psychology,45, 1185–1195.
Brehm, S. S., &Kassin, S. M. (1990).Social psychology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Brunswik, E. (1956).Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chadwick, R., & Doherty, M. E. (1993, November).Inattention to data relevant to alternative hypotheses. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Washington, DC.
]Chapman, L. J., &Chapman, J. P. (1969). Illusory correlation as an obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs.Journal of Abnormal Psychology,74, 271–280.
]Cowan, N. (1988). Evolving conceptions of memory storage, selective attention, and their mutual constraints within the human information processing system.Psychological Bulletin,104, 163–191.
]Cowan, N. (1993). Activation, attention, and short-term memory.Memory & Cognition,21, 162–167.
]Crocker, J. (1981). Judgment of covariation by social perceivers.Psychological Bulletin,90, 272–292.
Dawes, R. M. (1994).House of cards: Psychology and psychotherapy built on myth. New York: Free Press.
]Devine, P. G., Hirt, E. R., &Gehrke, E. M. (1990). Diagnostic and confirmation strategies in trait hypothesis testing.Journal of Personality & Social Psychology,58, 952–963.
]Doherty, M. E., &Mynatt, C. R. (1990). Inattention to P(H) and to P(D/~H): A converging operation.Acta Psychologica,75, 1–11.
]Doherty, M. E., Mynatt, C. R., Tweney, R. D., &Schiavo, M. D. (1979). Pseudodiagnosticity.Acta Psychologica,43, 111–121.
]Doherty, M. E., Schiavo, M. B., Tweney, R. D., &Mynatt, C. R. (1981). The influence of feedback and diagnostic data on pseudodiagnosticity.Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society,18, 191–194.
]Evans, J. St.B. T. (1984). Heuristic and analytic processes in reasoning.British Journal of Psychology,75, 451–468.
Evans, J. St.B. T. (1989).Bias in human reasoning: Causes and consequences. London: Erlbaum.
Garavan, H. (1992).When falsification fails. Unpublished master’s thesis, Bowling Green State University.
Gilbert, D. T. (1995). Attribution and interpersonal perception. In A. Tesser (Ed.),Advanced social psychology (pp. 99–147). New York: McGraw-Hill.
]Gorman, M. E., Stafford, A., &Gorman, M. E. (1987). Disconfirmation and dual hypotheses on a more difficult version of Wason’s 2-4-6 task.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,39A, 1–28.
]Hammond, K. R., Hamm, R. M., Grassia, J., &Pearson, T. (1987). Direct comparison of the efficacy of intuitive and analytical cognition in expert judgment.IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, & Cybernetics,SMC-17, 753–770.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (in press). On the reality of cognitive illusions: A reply to Gigerenzer’s critique.Psychological Review.
]Kareev, Y., &Halberstadt, N. (1993). Evaluating negative tests and refutations in a rule discovery task.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,46A, 715–727.
]Kern, L., &Doherty, M. E. (1982). “Pseudodiagnosticity” in an idealized medical problem-solving environment.Journal of Medical Education,57, 100–104.
]Klayman, J., &Brown, K. (1993). Debias the environment instead of the judge: An alternative approach to reducing error in diagnostic (and other) judgment.Cognition,49, 97–122.
]Klayman, J., &Ha, Y.-W. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing.Psychological Review,94, 211–228.
]Klayman, J., &Ha, Y.-W. (1989). Hypothesis testing in rule discovery: Strategy, structure, and content.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,15, 596–604.
]Koehler, J. J. (1996). The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative and methodological challenges.Behavioral & Brain Sciences,19, 1–53.
]Kruglanski, A. W., &Mayseless, O. (1988). Contextual effects in hypothesis testing: The role of competing alternatives and epistemic motivations.Social Cognition,6, 1–20.
Markus, H., &Zajonc, R. B. (1985). The cognitive perspective in social psychology. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.),The handbook of social psychology: Vol. 1. Theory and method (3rd. ed., pp. 137–230). New York: Random House.
McKenzie, C. R. M. (1994).Taking into account the strength of an alternative hypothesis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.
]Mynatt, C. R., Doherty, M. E., &Dragan, W. (1993). Information relevance, working memory, and the consideration of alternatives.The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,46A, 759–778.
]Mynatt, C. R., Doherty, M. E., &Sullivan, J. A. (1991). Data selection in a minimal hypothesis testing task.Acta Psychologica,76, 293–305.
]Mynatt, C. R., Doherty, M. E., &Tweney, R. D. (1978). Consequences of confirmation and disconfirmation in a simulated research environment.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,30, 395–406.
]Robinson, L. B., &Hastie, R. (1985). Revision of opinion when a hypothesis is eliminated from consideration.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,11, 443–456.
Sabini, J. (1995).Social psychology. New York: Norton.
]Skov, R. B., &Sherman, S. J. (1986). Information-gathering processes: Diagnosticity, hypothesis-confirmatory strategies, and perceived hypothesis confirmation.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,22, 93–121.
]Slowiaczek, L. M., Klayman, J., Sherman, S. J., &Skov, R. B. (1992). Information selection and use in hypothesis testing: What is a good question, and what is a good answer?Memory & Cognition,20, 392–405.
Smith, E. R., & Mackie, D. M. (1995). Social psychology. Worth.
]Snyder, M., &Swann, W. B. (1978). Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,14, 148–162.
]Trope, Y., &Bassok, M. (1982). Confirmatory and diagnosing strategies in social information gathering.Journal of Personality & Social Psychology,43, 22–34.
]Trope, Y., &Bassok, M. (1983). Information-gathering strategies in hypothesis-testing.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,19, 560–576.
]Trope, Y., &Mackie, D. M. (1987). Sensitivity to alternatives in social hypothesis-testing.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,23, 445–459.
]Tweney, R. D., &Doherty, M. E. (1983). Rationality and the psychology of inference.Synthèse,57, 139–161.
]Tweney, R. D., Doherty, M. E., Worner, W., Pliske, D., Mynatt, C. R., Gross, K., &Arkkelin, D. (1980). Strategies of rule discovery in an inference task.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,32, 109–123.
Van Wallendael, L. R. (1989). The quest for limits on noncomplementarity in opinion revision.Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes,43, 385–405.
]Van Wallendael, L. R., &Guignard, Y. (1992). Diagnosticity, confidence, and the need for information.Behavioral Decision Making,5, 25–37.
]Van Wallendael, L. R., &Hastie, R. (1990). Tracing the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes: Cognitive representations of hypothesis testing.Memory & Cognition,18, 240–250.
]Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,12, 129–140.
]Wason, P. C. (1968). Reasoning about a rule.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,20, 273–281.
Wason, P. C., &Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1972).Psychology of reasoning: Structure and content. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Webster, E. C. (1982).The employment interview: A social judgment process. Schomberg, ON: S.I.P. Publications.
]Wharton, C. M., Cheng, P. W., &Wickens, T. D. (1993). Hypothesistesting strategies: Why two goals are better than one.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,46A, 743–758.
]Wolf, F. M., Gruppen, L. D., &Billi, J. E. (1985). Differential diagnosis and the competing-hypothesis heuristic.Journal of the American Medical Association,253, 2858–2862.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This manuscript was prepared with the support of National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9422253 to Bowling Green State University, M.E.D. and C.R.M., principal investigators. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions to this paper made by Ruth Beyth-Marom, Gernot Kleiter, and an anonymous reviewer.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Doherty, M.E., Chadwick, R., Garavan, H. et al. On people’s understanding of the diagnostic implications of probabilistic data. Mem Cogn 24, 644–654 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201089
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201089