Inferential Correction

Abstract

It is sometimes said that Tversky and Kahneman (1974) described two-and a-half heuristics. Although the bulk of the research inspired by their seminal paper has indeed focused on the representativeness and availability heuristics, the remaining half-heuristic may well be the one that psychologists not yet born will consider the most important. Why? Because whereas the celebrity heuristics describe processes by which people make particular kinds of judgments (i.e., frequency and probability judgments on the one hand; categorical identity judgments on the other), their obscure sibling – anchoring and adjustment – describes the process by which the human mind does virtually all of its inferential work. Indeed, one of psychology's fundamental insights is that judgments are generally the products of nonconscious systems that operate quickly, on the basis of scant evidence, and in a routine manner, and then pass their hurried approximations to consciousness, which slowly and deliberately adjusts them. In this sense, anchoring and adjustment is a fundamental description of mental life. This chapter reviews some work on adjustment – or what my collaborators and I call correction processes – in the domain of dispositional inference. A CORRECTION MODEL OF DISPOSITIONAL INFERENCE We care about what others do, but we care more about why they do it. Two equally rambunctious nephews may break two equally expensive crystal vases at Aunt Sofia's house, but the one who did so by accident gets the reprimand and the one who did so by design gets the thumbscrews.