Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionAssociative processes in intuitive judgment
Section snippets
Intuitive judgment and associative memory
The study of intuitive judgment has identified a long list of systematic errors (biases) and specific models that explain subsets of these errors. Many of the models proposed to account for these judgment errors invoke a dual-process or dual-system view, in which automatic processes (System 1) generate impressions and tentative judgments, which might be accepted, blocked, or corrected by controlled processes (System 2; e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Even the originators of the two-system view,
Feature 1: associative coherence
A stimulus evokes a coherent and self-reinforcing pattern of reciprocal activation in associative memory. For example, exposure to an emotional word – VOMIT – brings about a facial expression of disgust and a motor response of recoil, as well as an autonomic response and a lowered threshold for detecting and responding to noxious stimuli 16, 17. The reciprocity of many of these connections has been a theme of recent research. The facial expression and the act of recoiling tend to reinforce an
Feature 2: attribute substitution
Judgment intentions resemble a shotgun more than a rifle. Because dimensions of judgment are associated with each other, an intention to evaluate a particular attribute of a stimulus automatically activates assessments of other dimensions as well as. For example, people who listened to words with the task of detecting whether the words rhyme were slowed by a mismatch of spelling: VOTE–GOAT was confirmed as rhyming more slowly than VOTE–NOTE [48]. The comparison of spelling was evoked
Feature 3: processing fluency
The influence of processing fluency on judgment has been the subject of intense research interest in recent years, (e.g. 56, 57, 58). In a counter-intuitive demonstration, people who were asked to recall 12 instances in which they had behaved assertively subsequently judged themselves to be less assertive than did people asked to recall only 6 instances. Evidently, the difficulty of retrieving the last few instances was the heuristic by which assertiveness was judged [59]. The same
Concluding remarks
As we understand them, System 1 and System 2 are best described as operating systems – software, not hardware. They share hardware and data, can operate in parallel, and tasks can migrate between them. We have identified System 1 with the automatic and mostly unconscious operations of associative memory. System 1 generates impressions, intuitions and response tendencies that are monitored, sometimes rejected and sometimes modified and made explicit by the slower and mostly conscious operations
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of NIH grant P30 AG24928. We thank Shane Frederick, Dan Gilbert, Tom Gilovich, Gideon Keren, David Shanks, Anne Treisman and Norbert Schwarz for their helpful comments, and Shane Frederick for the ‘outrage heuristic’ Figure I in Box 2.
Glossary
- Associative memory
- a network of long-term memory for semantic information, emotions and goals that is governed by the spread of activation, as determined by the strengths of interconnecting weights (associations).
- Accessibility
- the ease with which a particular unit of information is activated or can be retrieved from memory.
- Anchoring effect
- the assimilation of a second estimate to an anchor – a value considered during the prior estimate.
- Confirmation bias
- testing a hypothesis by considering more
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