title: Fast and frugal framing effects?
abstract: Using 3 experiments, we examine whether simple pairwise comparison judgments, involving the recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002), are sensitive to implicit cues to the nature of the comparison required. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that participants frequently choose the recognized option of a pair if asked to make "larger" judgments but are significantly less likely to choose the unrecognized option when asked to make "smaller" judgments. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate that, overall, participants consider recognition to be a more reliable guide to judgments of a magnitude criterion than lack of recognition and that this intuition drives the framing effect. These results support the idea that when making pairwise comparison judgments, inferring that the recognized item is large is simpler than inferring that the unrecognized item is small.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, England. r.a.mccloy@reading.ac.uk
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: McCloy
authors.forename: C Philip
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Beaman
authors.forename: Caren A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Frosch
authors.forename: Kate
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Goddard
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult