The simple life: New experimental tests of the recognition heuristic

Abstract

The recognition heuristic (RH) is a hypothesized decision strategy that is assumed to enable individuals to make decisions quickly and with minimal effort. To further test this hypothesized strategy, an experiment assessed the proportion of RH consistent selections when recognition was unconfounded with any other cues (at the group level). This was accomplished by showing participants a fictitious city in the beginning of the experimental procedure, before asking them to decide Whether the previously presented city or a novel fictitious city has the larger population. As hypothesized, people made significantly more RH-consistent selections than chance. Thus, Experiment 1 demonstrated that RH can explain a considerable proportion of participant decisions in a procedure that experimentally excluded alternative interpretations of that behavior. In a second experiment, each participant was given a training session with accuracy feedback. In one group, well-known cities were larger on 80% of trials. In another group, well-known cities were larger on 50% of trials. In a third group, well-known cities were larger on only 20% of trials. On a judgment task later in the procedure, on which there was no feedback, participants from the third group made significantly fewer RH-consistent selections than those in the first two groups. Overall, the present results experimentally remove potential confounds and ambiguities that were present in many prior studies. Specifically, Experiment 1 establishes that people’s choice of recognized over unrecognized objects truly does reflect the use of recognition, rather than other cues; Experiment 2 experimentally demonstrates that learned recognition validity affects the use of recognition, even with a small training sample.