title: The moderating influence of variability on belief revision.
abstract: The variability of the information on which a belief was initially based should moderate the degree to which the belief is revised when new disconfirming information is received. Reasoning from everyday intuitions, psychological theories of concept representation, and a rational mathematical analysis, we inferred that as variability increased, resistance to disconfirming information would also increase. Participants' judgments of the central tendencies of distributions of numerical information confirmed this prediction.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Campus Box 345, 80309, Boulder, CO, rehder@psych.colorado. edu.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rehder
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hastie