The Role of Mental Simulation in Judgments of Likelihood

This research examined how people simulate causal scenarios. Several factors affect the perceived likelihood of a given causal scenario. In particular, generating one, several, or multiple causal scenarios affects the perceived probability of the focal causal scenario. In experiment 1, the perceived...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inOrganizational behavior and human decision processes Vol. 70; no. 2; pp. 135 - 148
Main Authors Dougherty, Michael R.P., Gettys, Charles F., Thomas, Rickey P.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01.05.1997
Elsevier
Elsevier Science Publishing Company, Inc
SeriesOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Subjects
Behavioral sciences
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Cognition. Intelligence
Decision making
Decision making. Choice
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Judgments
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Studies
Human
Mental representation
Simulation
Confidence
Decision making
Cognition
Causality
Subjective probability
Judgment
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:This research examined how people simulate causal scenarios. Several factors affect the perceived likelihood of a given causal scenario. In particular, generating one, several, or multiple causal scenarios affects the perceived probability of the focal causal scenario. In experiment 1, the perceived likelihood of the focal causal scenario was affected by the number of causal scenarios the participant constructed. Experiment 2 manipulated the likelihood of the scenarios the participants constructed; the judged probability of the focal causal scenario was affected by the likelihood of the scenarios constructed by the participants. The results of both experiments suggest that participants use several scenario-evaluation mechanisms to “prune” the set of causal scenarios under consideration. These mechanisms involve consistency checking and searching for leading contenders.
ISSN:0749-5978
1095-9920
DOI:10.1006/obhd.1997.2700