Predicting the directionality of probability words from their membership functions

• Published in: Journal of behavioral decision making Vol. 16; no. 3; pp. 159 - 180
• Main Authors: Budescu, David V., Karelitz, Tzur M., Wallsten, Thomas S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.07.2003; Wiley Periodicals Inc
• Subjects: Decision making; directionality; Hypotheses; Linguistics; membership functions; Probability; probability judgments; Semantics; Studies; subjective probabilities; verbal probabilities
• ISSN: 0894-3257; 1099-0771
• DOI: 10.1002/bdm.440

Teigen and Brun have suggested that distinct from their numerical implications, most probability phrases are either positive or negative, in that they encourage one to think of reasons why the target event will or will not occur. We report two experiments testing our hypotheses that (a) the direction of a phrase can be predicted from properties of its membership function, and (b) this relation is invariant across contexts, and (c) —originally formulated by Teigen and Brun (1999)—that strong modifiers intensify phrase directionality. For each phrase, participants encoded membership functions by judging the degree to which it described the numerical probabilities 0.0, 0.1, …, 1.0, and also completed sentences including the target phrase. The types of reasons given in the sentence completion task were used to determine the phrase's directionality. The results support our hypotheses (a) and (b) regarding the relation between directionality and the membership functions, but we found only limited support for hypothesis (c) regarding the effects of modifiers on directionality. A secondary goal, to validate an efficient method of encoding membership functions, was also achieved. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.