糖心TV

Florian Kutzner (糖心TV 糖心TV School)

Discussion: Absent (vs. present) or present (vs. present) – A new variant of framing?

Human judgments of proportions, causal relations, co-variations and predictive relations have all been studied extensively. As so often, results testify to both, accuracy and proneness to bias at the same time. Following Garner (1978), I will introduce a taxonomy of stimulus attributes, distinguishing features and dimensions, that might help understand some of the contradictory patterns. In a nutshell, features are attributes that are either present or absent, whereas dimensions are always present, to varying degrees. Several initial experiments show that framing evidence as feature (versus dimension) results in more summative (versus comparative) processing. Also, if assuming that a present-absent framing conveys that present levels are less common than absent levels, it might be possible to construct arguments for the (Bayesian) rationality of some of these effects (e.g. for co-variation see, McKenzie & Mikkelsen, 2007). However, are these real farming effects? Are the Bayesian arguments valid? And, is this effect relevant in other domains?

Garner, W. R. (1978). Aspects of a stimulus: Features, dimensions, and configurations. In E. Rosch & B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization. Oxford England: Lawrence Erlbaum

McKenzie, C., & Mikkelsen, L. (2007). A bayesian view of covariation assessment.

Cognitive Psychology, 54(1), 33-61. oi:dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.04.00

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