Adaptive Mechanisms for Treating Missing Information: A Simulation Study

García‐Retamero, Rocío; Rieskamp, Jörg

doi:10.1007/bf03395637

Cited by 21 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Gaissmaier, 2011;Gigerenzer, Hertwig & Pachur, 2011;Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman, 2002). These rules allow people to reach 'good enough' judgments from limited information (Brunswik, 1952;Simon, 1990; see also Garcia-Retamero & Rieskamp, 2008Hogarth & Karelaia, 2007). The truth bias may be the result of using just such a simplified rule, informed by past experience with the situation.…”

Section: Individuating Cuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

ALIED: Humans as adaptive lie detectors.

Street¹

2015

Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition

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People make for poor lie detectors. They have accuracy rates comparable to a coin toss, and come with a set of systematic biases that sway the judgment. This pessimistic view stands in contrast to research showing that people make informed decisions that adapt to the context they operate in. The current article proposes a new theoretical direction for lie detection research. I argue that lie detectors make informed, adaptive judgments in a low-diagnostic world. This Adaptive Lie Detector People have little idea of when they are being lied to, with accuracy rates only marginally above chance (Bond & DePaulo, 2006;Kraut, 1980). They seem to have the wrong beliefs about what cues give away liars (The Global Deception Research Team, 2006), and even with training there is only a modest increase in accuracy (Frank & Feeley, 2003;Hauch, Sporer, Michael & Meissner, 2014). What is more, there is a robust bias to take what others say at face value and believe it is the truth, dubbed the 'truth bias' (Bond & DePaulo, 2006;McCornack & Parks, 1986), which some have taken as evidence that people are gullible (Buller & Burgoon, 1996;O'Sullivan, 2003) and not in control of this bias (Gilbert, 1991). This pessimistic view has been dominant in the field for some time (e.g., Bond & DePaulo, 2006;Kraut, 1980;Mandelbaum, 2014;Vrij, Granhag & Porter, 2010). The current article takes a new position. I draw on recent advances and present a more optimistic view of the lie detector: as one who makes informed judgments in a low diagnostic world. In particular, I take a more Brunswikian point of view and argue that people adapt their judgment strategies based on the nature of the information available (see Brunswik, 1952). This is referred to as the Adaptive Lie Detector account (ALIED). Overview of the AccountThe ALIED account is inspired by advances in the decision-making literature, in particular the adaptive decision making perspective (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001; Gigerenzer, Todd & The ABC Group, 1999;Platzer & Bröder, 2012;Simon, 1990).In an information-limited world and with a finite cognitive capacity, people can arrive at satisfactorily accurate judgments. By adapting to the context, one can put those limited resources to best use. Simplified strategies such as recognition and heuristics allow for 'satisficing' inferences to be made (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001;Simon, 1956Simon, , 1990. Notably, people do not default to leaning on their contextual knowledge, 4 but vicariously adapt what information they use in order to make an informed judgment (Brunswik, 1952). These simplified context-general rules help form decisions under uncertainty (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011;Simon, 1990).ALIED proposes that people attempt to form a judgment about a specific statement by using information that pertains directly to that specific statement. For instance, a confession that the statement is false is an individuating piece of information that can help us decide whether this particular statement is true or false.Similarly, verbal cues...

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Section: Individuating Cuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

ALIED: Humans as adaptive lie detectors.

Street¹

2015

Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition

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“…After allocating a different importance and value to each cue, the subjective value of each cue is multiplied by its importance weight. Finally the results of each multiplication are summed (e.g., Garcia-Retamero, Rieskamp, 2008;Bergert , Nosofsky, 2007). As a result, the WADD is very robust and reliable but time consuming and information demanding, which is not suitable under time and cognitive constraints (e.g., Rieskamp, Otto, 2006;Bergert, Nosofsky, 2007;Broder, Gaissmaier, 2007).…”

Section: Decision-making Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the values of the most important cue are the same among the different alternatives, the next cue is examined according to the same procedure until one of the cues has a greater value for one of the alternatives. If all cues have the same value the decision maker will choose randomly among them (Gigerenzer, Todd, 2001;Hogarth, Karelaia, 2006;Rieskamp, Otto, 2006).…”

Section: Decision-making Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using the WADD strategy in a very limited time or with low attention capacities could result in an interruption of the process before it leads to a result or to bad decisions based on computational errors (Payne, Bettman, 2002). On the other hand, the non systematic character of the TTB noncompensatory strategy does not guarantee that the best decision has been made but rather a satisfying decision, implying a limited cognitive effort and time cost (Gigerenzer, Goldstein, 1996). Overall, it cannot be concluded that the WADD or the TTB is the best strategy; their effectiveness depends on both the environment (e.g., information available) and the relationship between the decision maker's cognitive resources and the task's complexity, according to the notion of bounded rationality (Simon, 1982).…”

Section: Decision-making Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Overall, it cannot be concluded that the WADD or the TTB is the best strategy; their effectiveness depends on both the environment (e.g., information available) and the relationship between the decision maker's cognitive resources and the task's complexity, according to the notion of bounded rationality (Simon, 1982). As Gigerenzer and Todd (2001) suggested, individuals have a toolbox of decision-making strategies in which they choose the one deemed to be the most suitable in a specific situation 1 . As a result, a great amount of research has focused on the conditions of the use of one or another strategy, testing the adaptive nature of decision-making strategies.…”

Section: Decision-making Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Experts Use Compensatory Strategies More Often Than Novices in Hiring Decisions

Hanák¹,

Sirota²,

Juanchich³

2013

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Previous research focusing on decision making has reported that most novices use an extensive set of cues in a compensatory way to make their decisions (i.e., compensatory strategies), whereas most experts use a limited set of relevant cues in a non-compensatory way (i.e., non-compensatory strategies). We tested the generalizability of these conclusions in a personnel selection context with students as novices and recruiters as experts. In a realistic setting, we investigated the effect of expertise on a subjective and an objective measure of decision making strategies. Results showed that, in contrast with previous research, both novices and experts mostly u sed compensa tory strategies and that experts u sed them more often than novices. Further, consistently with previous research, experts allocated more importance than novices to cues predicting future job performance. We discussed theoretical and practical implications of our findings.Key words: decision-making, personnel selection, compensatory, non-compensatory, expertise Despite its obvious practical and theoretical importance, too little attention has been paid to descriptive models of decision-making in selection and recruitment. The aim of this paper is to shed light on decision-making strategies of novices and experts in personnel selection. Decision-Making StrategiesWhen making decisions one can use a repertoire of strategies. In this article, the term decision strategy refers to a "sequence of mental and effector (actions on environment) operations used to transform an initial state of knowledge into a final goal state of knowledge" (Payne, Bettman, Johnson, 1993). These strategies refer to different procedures and potentially reach different outcomes (e.g., Dieckman, Rieskamp, 2007; GarciaRetamero, Rieskamp, 2008). The first and common stage of a decision-making strategy is to assess the importance of the different attributes or cues of the available options. For example, job experience and educational level of a candidate are cues in making a personnel selection decision-making. To assess the importance of each cue, one can rank the cues by importance or allocate a specific weight to each of them. Then, the decision maker does or does not make tradeoffs among the cues for the different options (Payne, Bettman, Johnson, 1993). It is at that last stage that major differences arise between decision-making strategies. Compensatory strategies involve trade-offs among all the available cues weighted according to their values. On the contrary, non-compensatory

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Inferring Others' Hidden Thoughts: Smart Guesses in a Low Diagnostic World

Street

Bischof

Vadillo

et al. 2015

Behavioral Decision Making

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People are biased towards believing that what others say is what they truly think. This effect, known as the truth bias, has often been characterized as a judgmental error that impedes accuracy. We consider an alternative view: that it reflects the use of contextual information to make the best guess when the currently available information has low diagnosticity. Participants learnt the diagnostic value of four cues, which were present during truthful statements between 20% and 80% of the time. Afterwards, participants were given contextual information: Either that most people would lie, or most would tell the truth. We found that people were biased in the direction of the context information when the individuating behavioral cues were non-diagnostic. As the individuating cues became more diagnostic, context had less to no effect. We conclude that more general context information is used to make an informed judgment when other individuating cues are absent. That is, the truth bias reflects a smart guess in a low diagnostic world.Keywords: Adaptive decision-making; Adaptive Lie Detector; Context; Lie detection; Truth bias; Truth-default theory. 4People make for poor lie detectors. They hit an accuracy rate comparable to a coin toss, only marginally above chance (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). That might in part be because they come with a set of systematic biases that can reduce accuracy (see Burgoon & Buller, 1994; Gilbert, 1991;O'Sullivan, 2003;Vrij, 2008), such as being biased towards believing others are telling the truth more often than they actually are (Bond & DePaulo, 2006; McCornack & Parks, 1986). This article argues that the pessimistic view of lie detection is outdated and misguided: Instead we argue that people make smart judgments from the unreliable information available to them.Specifically, it is argued that the systematic biases are not sources of error, but are actually markers of a smart system making informed judgments.Although people are thought to be poor lie detectors, this stands in stark contrast to research showing that people are skilled at understanding what others are thinking.They have successful strategies to understand internal thoughts, drawing from even the subtlest of clues (e.g., from allusions in speech to eye direction: Clark, 1996; Clark, Schreuder & Buttrick, 1983;Tomasello, 1995; but see Heyes, 2014, for strategies that give only the illusion of representing others' minds), and these work only because the two parties choose to communicate with each other, producing behaviors that indicate their true thoughts. When one party wants to conceal what he or she truly thinks, these cues are not produced, or are at least drastically reduced.Accuracy is capped by the fact that speakers have good control over their behavior and do not give clear signs to their concealments and deceptions (DePaulo et al., 2003; Sporer & Schwandt, 2006, 2007. So we must ask how it is that people make any sort of social judgment when the immediately available cues have low diagnostic value. Put...

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Adaptive Mechanisms for Treating Missing Information: A Simulation Study

Cited by 21 publications

References 55 publications

ALIED: Humans as adaptive lie detectors.

ALIED: Humans as adaptive lie detectors.

Experts Use Compensatory Strategies More Often Than Novices in Hiring Decisions

Inferring Others' Hidden Thoughts: Smart Guesses in a Low Diagnostic World

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