Between ignorance and truth: Partition dependence and learning in judgment under uncertainty.

In 3 studies, participants viewed sequences of multiattribute objects (e.g., colored shapes) appearing with varying frequencies and judged the likelihood of the attributes of those objects. Judged probabilities reflected a compromise between (a) the frequency with which each attribute appeared and (b) the ignorance prior probability cued by the number of distinct values that the focal attribute could take on. Thus, judged probabilities were partition dependent, varying with the number of events into which the state space was subjectively divided. This bias was diminished among participants more confident in what they learned, was strong and insensitive to level of confidence when ignorance priors were especially salient, and required ignorance priors to be salient only when probabilities were elicited (not during encoding).

• Publication year

  2006

• Venue

  Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory and Cognition

• Publication date

  2006-12-04

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1037/0278-7393.32.6.1385PMID 17087591
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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