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Recognition-based judgments and decisions: What we have learned (so far)

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Julian N. Marewski
Julian N. Marewski
Julian N. Marewski
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Rüdiger Pohl at University of Mannheim
Rüdiger Pohl
Oliver Vitouch at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
Oliver Vitouch
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This special issue on recognition processes in inferential decision making represents an adversarial collaboration among the three guest editors. This introductory article to the special issue's third and final part comes in three sections. In Section 1, we summarize the six papers that appear in this part. In Section 2, we give a wrap-up of the lessons learned. Specifically, we discuss (i) why studying the recognition heuristic has led to so much controversy, making it difficult to settle on mutually accepted empirically grounded assumptions, (ii) whether the development of the recognition heuristic and its theoretical descriptions could explain some of the past controversies and misconceptions, (iii) how additional cue knowledge about unrecognized objects could enter the decision process, (iv) why recognition heuristic theory should be complemented by a probabilistic model of strategy selection, and (v) how recognition information might be related to other information, especially when considering real-world applications. In Section 3, we present an outlook on the thorny but fruitful road to cumulative theory integration. Future research on recognition-based inferences should (i) converge on overcoming past controversies, taking an integrative approach to theory building, and considering theories and findings from neighboring fields (such as marketing science and artificial intelligence), (ii) build detailed computational process models of decision strategies, grounded in cognitive architectures, (iii) test existing models of such strategies competitively, (iv) design computational models of the mechanisms of strategy selection, and (v) effectively extend its scope to decision making in the wild, outside controlled laboratory situations.
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... If a person employs the recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002), the recognized object is inferred to score a larger value on a given criterion without any further consideration of probabilistic cues. There have been three special issues on this heuristic and intense debate (Marewski, Pohl, & Vitouch, 2010, Marewski, Pohl, & Vitouch, 2011a, Marewski et al., 2011b. ...
... accounts best for the behavior of most individuals. Other researchers might respond that studies such as the aforementioned ones by Glöckner andBröder (2011, 2014)-as well as others (e.g., Bröder & Eichler, 2006) -do not fall in the scope of the recognition heuristic, for instance, by examining the heuristic in inferences from givens as opposed to inferences from memory or by providing additional cue knowledge about unrecognized objects (see Oliver Vitouch's essay in Marewski et al., 2011b, for an overview of the history of specification and scope of the recognition heuristic; see also Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 2011, Marewski & Mehlhorn, 2011, Pohl, 2011. However, no such arguments may be raised against Heck and Erdfelder's (2017) reanalyses of existing data on inferences from memory. ...
... Although this seems to be an almost trivial requirement, scientific reality does not always meet the demands, and sometimes, the scope itself is misinterpreted, including by those who set out to test a model developed by others. The history of controversies on the recognition heuristic offers an example (see e.g., Oliver Vitouch's discussion of the development of that model in Marewski et al., 2011b). Similarly, scientists formulating single mechanism models may not always define the scope of their model in advance, and boundary conditions have to be explored empirically (e.g., Söllner, Bröder, & Hilbig, 2013) in a process of cumulative theory development. ...
Some Metatheoretical Reflections on Adaptive Decision Making and the Strategy Selection Problem: Adaptive Decision Making and Strategy Selection
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Organisms must be capable of adapting to environmental task demands. Which cognitive processes best model the ways in which adaptation is achieved? People can behave adaptively, so many frameworks assume, because they can draw from a repertoire of decision strategies, with each strategy particularly fitting to certain environmental demands. In contrast to that multi-mechanism assumption, competing approaches posit a single decision mechanism. The juxtaposition of such single-mechanism and multi-mechanism approaches has fuelled not only much theory-building, empirical research, and methodological developments, but also many controversies. This special issue on “Strategy Selection: A Theoretical and Methodological Challenge” sheds a spotlight on those developments. The contribution of this introductory article is twofold. First, we offer a documentation of the controversy, including an outline of competing approaches. Second, this special issue and this introductory article represent adversarial collaborations among the three of us: we have modeled adaptive decision making in different ways in the past. Together, we now work on resolving the controversy and point to five guiding principles that might help to improve our models for predicting adaptive behavior. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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... Indeed, Cologne does have more inhabitants than Kappeln, and Cologne may have appeared in your memory because it appears more often on the Web, in newspapers, or in personal discussions than the rather small city of Kappeln. This example shows that people who rely on only one reason (or "cue") can make successful decisions, in this case and in many different tasks (see Marewski, Pohl, & Vitouch, 2011). ...
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Presenting research and defining the relation between different areas of research (e.g., performance psychology and sport psychology) enhance the potential for cross‐fertilization on theoretical, methodological, and practical levels. This chapter clarifies the distinctions between performance psychology and sport psychology, and provides a general framework of performance psychology that is informative for sport psychology. It discusses the recognition heuristic, the take‐the‐best heuristic, and the hot‐hand heuristic. The chapter describes, explains, and predicts behavior according to the particles that form the building blocks of heuristics, and provides examples of how these building blocks are integrated into heuristics. The chapter examines the impact of findings in performance psychology on sport psychology and vice‐versa.
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... Additionally, research has identified several environments in which, from a prescriptive perspective, the recognition heuristic is ecologically rational and can compete with well-established forecasting instruments. These environments include the prediction of sports results such as Wimbledon or soccer, election outcomes, university rankings, and geographical properties such as the size of cities or mountains (for a recent overview of the discussion, see Marewski et al., 2011). ...
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... In such cases, where not all of the alternatives are recognized, the adaptive toolbox states that people rely on the recognition heuristic (RH; Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999), which is defined as a precise, formal model (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002, p. 76) as follows: "If one of two objects is recognized and the other is not, then infer that the recognized object has the higher value with respect to the criterion." The RH is one of the core heuristics of the adaptive toolbox and has been the subject of three special issues in Judgment and Decision Making (Marewski, Pohl, & Vitouch, 2010, Marewski et al., 2011a, 2011b. ...
Linking Process and Measurement Models of Recognition-Based Decisions
Article
Full-text available
  • Apr 2017
When making inferences about pairs of objects, one of which is recognized and the other is not, the recognition heuristic states that participants choose the recognized object in a noncompensatory way without considering any further knowledge. In contrast, information-integration theories such as parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) assume that recognition is merely one of many cues that is integrated with further knowledge in a compensatory way. To test both process models against each other without manipulating recognition or further knowledge, we include response times into the r-model, a popular multinomial processing tree model for memory-based decisions. Essentially, this response-time-extended r-model allows to test a crucial prediction of PCS, namely, that the integration of recognition-congruent knowledge leads to faster decisions compared to the consideration of recognition only—even though more information is processed. In contrast, decisions due to recognition-heuristic use are predicted to be faster than decisions affected by any further knowledge. Using the classical German-cities example, simulations show that the novel measurement model discriminates between both process models based on choices, decision times, and recognition judgments only. In a reanalysis of 29 data sets including more than 400,000 individual trials, noncompensatory choices of the recognized option were estimated to be slower than choices due to recognition-congruent knowledge. This corroborates the parallel information-integration account of memory-based decisions, according to which decisions become faster when the coherence of the available information increases.
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... This simple strategy works well in domains where recognition is correlated with the criterion (e.g., city sizes, mountain heights, turnover rates of companies), and it has been proposed as a psychological model for these situations. However, the non-compensatory nature of RH (people rely exclusively on recognition) has been debated extensively (e.g., Bröder & Eichler, 2006;Hilbig, Erdfelder, & Pohl, 2010;Marewski, Pohl, & Vitouch, 2010, 2011a, 2011bNewell, 2011;Newell & Fernandez, 2006;Pachur & Hertwig, 2006;Pachur, Todd, Gigerenzer, Schooler, & Goldstein, 2011Pohl, 2011), and studies demonstrating the compensatory use of additional cue knowledge have helped to delineate the conditions under which RH might be used (see Gigerenzer, Hertwig & Pachur, 2011). ...
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Article
Full-text available
  • Jan 2014
  • JUDGM DECIS MAK
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