Abstract
Recent research on human judgment and decision making has shown that subjects can use their perception of the relation between stimulus dimensions to infer or impute a value for missing information. Considerable individual differences have been evident. The present study tested the hypothesis that individual differences in the magnitude of the inference effect are related to the weight or importance attached to the missing information and the presumed nature of the interdimensional relationship. The hypothesis was tested in a task in which subjects were asked to rate the competence of hypothetical clinical psychologists on the basis of the clinicians’ experience in treating patients with a particular problem and their familiarity with recent developments in treatment.
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The authors would like to thank Patricia Deldin and Craig Russo for their assistance with this project.
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Levin, I.P., Johnson, R.D. & Chapman, D.P. Individual differences in dealing with incomplete information: Judging clinical competence. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 29, 451–454 (1991). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333968
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333968