When does ignorance make us smart? Additional factors guiding heuristic inference

Beaman, C.P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5124-242X, McCloy, R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2333-9640 and Smith, P.T. (2006) When does ignorance make us smart? Additional factors guiding heuristic inference. In: 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, pp. 54-58.

Abstract/Summary

“Fast & frugal” heuristics represent an appealing way of implementing bounded rationality and decision-making under pressure. The recognition heuristic is the simplest and most fundamental of these heuristics. Simulation and experimental studies have shown that this ignorance-driven heuristic inference can prove superior to knowledge based inference (Borges, Goldstein, Ortman & Gigerenzer, 1999; Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002) and have shown how the heuristic could develop from ACT-R’s forgetting function (Schooler & Hertwig, 2005). Mathematical analyses also demonstrate that, under certain conditions, a “less-is-more effect” will always occur (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002). The further analyses presented in this paper show, however, that these conditions may constitute a special case and that the less-is-more effect in decision-making is subject to the moderating influence of the number of options to be considered and the framing of the question.