Generalizations strengthen in traditional sciences, but in psychology (and social and behavioral sciences, more generally) they decay. This is usually viewed as a problem requiring solution. It could be viewed instead as a law-like phenomenon. Generalization decay cannot be squelched because human behavior is metastable and all behavioral data collected thus far have resulted from a thin sliver of human time.

Prior research on self-other differences involving risk have found that individuals make riskier decisions for others than for the self in situations where risk taking is valued. We expand this research by examining whether the direction of self-other differences reverses when risk aversion is valued, as predicted by social values theory (Stone & Allgaier, 2008). Two studies tested for self-other differences in physical safety scenarios, a domain where risk aversion is valued. In Study 1, participants read physical safety and romantic relationship scenarios and selected what they would decide for themselves, what they would decide for a friend, or what they would predict their friend would decide. In Study 2, participants read public health scenarios and either decided or predicted for themselves and for a friend. In keeping with social values theory, participants made more risk-averse decisions for others than for themselves in situations where risk aversion is valued (physical safety scenarios) but more risk-taking decisions for others than for themselves in situations where risk taking is valued (relationship scenarios). Further, we show that these self-other differences in decision making do not arise from incorrectly predicting others’ behaviors, as participants predicted that others’ decisions regarding physical safety scenarios would be either similar (Experiment 1) or more risk taking (Experiment 2) than their own decisions.

Good judgment is often gauged against two gold standards – coherence and correspondence. Judgments are coherent if they demonstrate consistency with the axioms of probability theory or propositional logic. Judgments are correspondent if they agree with ground truth. When gold standards are unavailable, silver standards such as consistency and discrimination can be used to evaluate judgment quality. Individuals are consistent if they assign similar judgments to comparable stimuli, and they discriminate if they assign different judgments to dissimilar stimuli. We ask whether “superforecasters”, individuals with noteworthy correspondence skills (see Mellers et al., 2014) show superior performance on laboratory tasks assessing other standards of good judgment. Results showed that superforecasters either tied or out-performed less correspondent forecasters and undergraduates with no forecasting experience on tests of consistency, discrimination, and coherence. While multifaceted, good judgment may be a more unified than concept than previously thought.

Organizations tasked with communicating expert judgments couched in uncertainty often use numerically bounded linguistic probability schemes to standardize the meaning of verbal probabilities. An experiment (N = 1,202) was conducted to ascertain whether agreement with such a scheme was better when probabilities were presented verbally, numerically or in a combined “verbal + numeric” format. Across three agreement measures, the numeric and combined formats outperformed the verbal format and also yielded better discrimination between low and high probabilities and were less susceptible to the fifty-fifty blip phenomenon. The combined format did not confer any advantage over the purely numeric format. The findings indicate that numerically bounded linguistic probability schemes are an ineffective means of communicating information about probabilities to others and they call into question recommendations for use of the combined format for delivering such schemes.

Three experiments (N = 550) examined the effect of an interval construction elicitation method used in several expert elicitation studies on judgment accuracy. Participants made judgments about topics that were either searchable or unsearchable online using one of two order variations of the interval construction procedure. One group of participants provided their best judgment (one step) prior to constructing an interval (i.e., lower bound, upper bound, and a confidence rating that the correct value fell in the range provided), whereas another group of participants provided their best judgment last, after the three-step confidence interval was constructed. The overall effect of this elicitation method was not significant in 8 out of 9 univariate tests. Moreover, the calibration of confidence intervals was not affected by elicitation order. The findings warrant skepticism regarding the benefit of prior confidence interval construction for improving judgment accuracy.

Although the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses method (ACH) is a structured analytic technique promoted in several intelligence communities for improving the quality of probabilistic hypothesis testing, it has received little empirical testing. Whereas previous evaluations have used numerical evidence assumed to be perfectly accurate, in the present experiment we tested the effectiveness of ACH using a judgment task that presented participants with uncertain evidence varying in source reliability and information credibility. Participants (N = 227) assigned probabilities to two alternative hypotheses across six cases that systematically varied case features. Across multiple tests of coherence, the ACH group showed no advantage over a no-technique control group. Both groups showed evidence of subadditivity, unreliability, and overly conservative non-Bayesian judgments. The ACH group also showed pseudo-diagnostic weighting of evidence. The findings do not support the claim that ACH is effective at improving probabilistic judgment.

In jurisdictions with two or more tiers of criminal courts, some defendants can choose the type of trial court to be tried in. This may involve a trade-off between the probability of acquittal/conviction and the estimated severity of sentence if convicted. For instance, in England and Wales, the lower courts have a higher conviction rate but limited sentencing powers, whereas the higher courts have a higher acquittal rate but greater sentencing powers. We examined 255 offenders’ choice of trial court type using a hypothetical scenario where innocence and guilt was manipulated. Participants’ choices were better predicted by a lexicographic than utility maximization model. A greater proportion of “guilty” participants chose the lower court compared to their “innocent” counterparts, and estimated sentence length was more important to the former than latter group. The present findings provide further support for heuristic decision-making in the criminal justice domain, and have implications for legal policy-making.

Individuals often assess themselves as being less susceptible to common biases compared to others. This bias blind spot (BBS) is thought to represent a metacognitive error. In this research, we tested three explanations for the effect: The cognitive sophistication hypothesis posits that individuals who display the BBS more strongly are actually less biased than others. The introspection bias hypothesis posits that the BBS occurs because people rely on introspection more when assessing themselves compared to others. The conversational processes hypothesis posits that the effect is largely a consequence of the pragmatic aspects of the experimental situation rather than true metacognitive error. In two experiments (N = 1057) examining 18 social/motivational and cognitive biases, there was strong evidence of the BBS. Among the three hypotheses examined, the conversational processes hypothesis attracted the greatest support, thus raising questions about the extent to which the BBS is a metacognitive effect.

Recent research suggests that communicating probabilities numerically rather than verbally benefits forecasters’ credibility. In two experiments, we tested the reproducibility of this communication-format effect. The effect was replicated under comparable conditions (low-probability, inaccurate forecasts), but it was reversed for low-probability accurate forecasts and eliminated for high-probability forecasts. Experiment 2 further showed that verbal probabilities convey implicit recommendations more clearly than probability information, whereas numeric probabilities do the opposite. Descriptively, the findings indicate that the effect of probability words versus numbers on credibility depends on how these formats convey directionality differently, how directionality implies recommendations even when none are explicitly given, and how such recommendations correspond with outcomes. Prescriptively, we propose that experts distinguish forecasts from advice, using numeric probabilities for the former and well-reasoned arguments for the latter.

Stastny and Lehner (2018) reported a study comparing the forecast accuracy of a US intelligence community prediction market (ICPM) to traditionally produced intelligence reports. Five analysts unaffiliated with the intelligence reports imputed forecasts from the reports after stating their personal forecasts on the same forecasting questions. The authors claimed that the accuracy of the ICPM was significantly greater than that of the intelligence reports and suggest this may have been due to methods that harness crowd wisdom. However, additional analyses conducted here show that the imputer’s personal forecasts, which were made individually, were as accurate as ICPM forecasts. In fact, their updated personal forecasts (made after reading the intelligence reports) were marginally more accurate than ICPM forecasts. Imputed forecasts are also strongly correlated with the imputers’ personal forecasts, casting doubt on the degree to which the imputation was in fact a reliably inter-subjective assessment of what intelligence reports implied about the forecasting questions. Alternative methods for comparing intelligence community forecasting methods are discussed.

A routine part of intelligence analysis is judging the probability of alternative hypotheses given available evidence. Intelligence organizations advise analysts to use intelligence-tradecraft methods such as Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) to improve judgment, but such methods have not been rigorously tested. We compared the evidence evaluation and judgment accuracy of a group of intelligence analysts who were recently trained in ACH and then used it on a probability judgment task to another group of analysts from the same cohort that were neither trained in ACH nor asked to use any specific method. Although the ACH group assessed information usefulness better than the control group, the control group was a little more accurate (and coherent) than the ACH group. Both groups, however, exhibited suboptimal judgment and were susceptible to unpacking effects. Although ACH failed to improve accuracy, we found that recalibration and aggregation methods substantially improved accuracy. Specifically, mean absolute error (MAE) in analysts’ probability judgments decreased by 61% after first coherentizing their judgments (a process that ensures judgments respect the unitarity axiom) and then aggregating their judgments. The findings cast doubt on the efficacy of ACH, and show the promise of statistical methods for boosting judgment quality in intelligence and other organizations that routinely produce expert judgments.

Bermúdez's case for rational framing effects, while original, is unconvincing and gives only parenthetical treatment to the problematic assumptions of extensional and semantic equivalence of alternative frames in framing experiments. If the assumptions are false, which they sometimes are, no valid inferences about “framing effects” follow and, then, neither do inferences about human rationality. This commentary recaps the central problem.

Lankford challenges two popular views of suicide terrorists: first, that they are psychologically normal and, second, that they are heroic, not unlike professional soldiers. I augment Lankford's critique by tracing these views to a simplistic situationist narrative and to a careless form of moral relativism to which many scholars adhere. Conceptual weaknesses of these positions are briefly discussed.

In The Rational Imagination, Byrne proposes a mental models account of why causal and counterfactual thinking often focus on different antecedents. This review critically examines the two central propositions of her account, finding both only weakly defensible. Byrne's account is contrasted with judgment dissociation theory, which offers a functional explanation for differences in the focus of causal and counterfactual thinking.

Consistent with Barbey & Sloman (B&S), it is proposed that performance on Bayesian inference tasks is well explained by nested sets theory (NST). However, contrary to those authors' view, it is proposed that NST does better by dispelling with dual-systems assumptions. This article examines why, and sketches out a series of NST's core principles, which were not previously defined.

The rationality debate centers on the meaning of deviations of decision makers' responses from the predictions/prescriptions of normative models. But for the debate to have significance, the meaning and functions of normative analysis must be clear. Presently, they are not, and the debate's persistence owes much to conceptual blur. An attempt is made here to clarify the concept of normative analysis.