Reading Questions for Nov. 12

Contingency Judgment

Kao, Shu-Fang; Waserman, Edward A. Assessment of an information integration account of contingency judgment with examination of subjective cell importance and method of information presentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition. Vol 19(6), Nov 1993, 1363-1386.

1. What is the normative method for computing the contingency between two variables based on a 2 × 2 table?

2. What strategies do people actually use for computing contingencies? How much weight do they give to each of the 4 cells in the 2 × 2 table?

Mandel, D.R. & Lehman, D.R. (1998). Integration of contingency information in judgments of cause, covariation, and probability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127, 269-285.

3. What is the feature-analytic approach used here?

4. What are the positive-test and sufficiency-test biases and how can they explain the fact that people give more weight to some cells of the 2 × 2 table than other?

McKenzie, Craig R. M. The accuracy of intuitive judgment strategies: Covariation assessment and Bayesian inference. Cognitive Psychology. Vol 26(3), Jun 1994, 209-239.

5. What contingency judgment strategies does McKenzie consider? Which one does he consider to be normative?

6. What is the relationship among the strategies? How well do simple strategies agree with the normative strategy?