Presentation mode, task importance, and cue order in experimental research on expert judges.

Abstract

Two related groups of expert judges—external and governmental auditors—each made significantly different probability judgments depending on whether experimental task materials were presented in writing (visual mode), orally (auditory mode), or both (visual/auditory mode). A second experiment, designed to partially explain why judgments differed across presentation modes, indicated that materiality, an auditor's term for task importance, interacted with presentation mode but that qualitative/quantitative cue order, a surrogate for time span of recall, did not. These experiments provide evidence that research on expert judges need consider the potential costs of sacrificing external validity when the real world equivalent of an experimental task is likely to communicate information verbally or to vary presentation mode.

Paper people versus direct observation: An empirical examination of laboratory methodologies

“…While previous studies (Farmer, Williams, Lee, Condick, Howell and Rooker, 1976;Juhnke, Vought, Pyszczynski, Dane, Losure and Wrightsman, 1979;Ricchiute, 1985;Murphy et al, 1986) have documented differential experimental outcomes for paper people versus direct observation, none have explicitly tested possible explanations for these differences. The primary goal of this study was to test competing predictions derived from the stimulus mode and signal-tonoise ratio hypotheses.…”