Content and consistency in probabilistic inference tasks

• Published in: Organizational behavior and human performance Vol. 26; no. 1; pp. 54 - 64
• Main Authors: Brehmer, Berndt, Kuylenstierna, Jan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.01.1980
• ISSN: 0030-5073
• DOI: 10.1016/0030-5073(80)90046-X

Four experiments investigated the relation between content and consistency in multiple-cue probability learning tasks. The first two experiments show that giving the task a content seen by the subjects as indicating probabilistic cue-criterion relations, does not change their general approach to the task; subjects behave in the same way in these conditions as in conditions involving no task content. The results of Experiments 3 and 4 replicate earlier results from abstract single-cue probability learning tasks which indicated that giving information about the probabilistic nature of the task and the strategy to use does not lead to better performance. It is concluded that although an inappropriate, deterministic strategy may be the explanation why subjects perform suboptimally in probabilistic inference tasks, changing this strategy to a more appropriate statistical one does not help, presumably because the subjects lack the processing capacity needed to implement this kind of strategy.