On the influence of rarity on contingency judgments - Implications for the formation of prejudice and Bayesian models of human judgment

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Florian Luitpold Wilhelm Kutzner
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2012 to 2013
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 222017720

Accurate contingency judgments allow to develop causal explanations and to predict the future. Human contingency judgments are, nonetheless, consistently at variance with statistical indices. Research shows that judgments mainly depend on the presence of aspects, while statistical indices require taking their absence into account as well. For example, in judging the contingency between migraine and stress, days characterized by stress and migraine (features present) have a stronger impact on judgments than days without (features absent). At the same time, social cognition research shows that rare aspects have a stronger influence on stereotypic contingency judgments than frequent aspects. In the present proposal, it is investigated whether the perception of rarity can also account for the differential effect of present versus absent features. Four experiments and a meta-analysis are proposed that study the influence of two cues to rarity: linguistic quantifiers like „rare“ or „frequent“ and the type of an aspects, i.e. whether an aspects is perceived as „feature“ (present or absent) or as „dimension“ (always present to varying degrees). The hypothesis is tested that the presence of an aspect is perceived as less frequent than its absence and therefore has a stronger impact on contingency judgments. If indeed cues to rarity change how contingencies are judged, this would have intriguing theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, influences of rarity are captured within a Bayesian approach to contingency judgments, therefore offering a more adequate descriptive model for human contingency judgments than traditional statistics. Practically, this research might help frame communication about social minorities in a way that minimizes their association with rare, usually negative, attributes.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Dr. Nick Chater