David M. Sanbonmatsu - US grants

9308380 Sanbonmatsu In decision making and everyday judgment, people must frequently draw conclusions and make decisions on the basis of limited or incomplete information. Rarely is complete information available about all relevant dimensions or aspects of a target object or issue. Consequently, it is important to understand how people respond to limited information. This collaborative research is designed to investigate the psychological processes involved in decision making based on limited or incomplete evidence. It is guided by the omission detection model, which prior research has shown to be useful for integrating many seemingly unrelated findings and for generating many new hypotheses concerning the judgmental effects of previously neglected decision relevant variables. The research investigates several different judgmental processes (i.e., sensitivity to missing information, attributional processes, and inference processes), several different dimensions of judgment (i.e., judgmental extremity, confidence, and uncertainty), and several different types of judgments (i.e., attitudinal judgments, preference judgments, likelihood judgments, and judgments of category membership). The goal of this research is to extend prior theory and research on the omission detection model, and to develop debiasing applications based on this model. The research will assess the utility of these procedures for improving judgment and decision making based on limited evidence. ***

stimulus /response; judgment; attitude; prejudice; stimulus generalization; semantics; behavioral /social science research tag; human subject; clinical research;