Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: People are able to judge frequency (FQ), but are they using FQ information only, or are they using other information, such as contextual diversity (CD) as a proxy to estimate FQ?The perceived-FQ-as-CD hypothesis proposes that people do not use frequency counts independently of context to produce judgments of frequency (JOF).That is, the number and type of contexts in which we have seen an event affect our subjective experience of FQ.We present an experiment where we compare items seen in a varied and constant context.Although showing overall underestimation, JOFs correlated .53 with real FQ.But JOFs for varied-context items are higher and hence closer to item FQ than repeated context controls.Surprisingly, CD may be a better predictor of FQ than simple counts, which could mean that people use contextual information in their estimations of FQ.
Institutions: University of Warwick, University of Sussex
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1560079458