Jove
Visualize
Contact Us

Related Experiment Videos

Explanation, imagination, and confidence in judgment.

D J Koehler1

  • 1Department of Psychology, Stanford University, California 94305-2130.

Psychological Bulletin
|November 1, 1991
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Illusory correlations in graphological inference.

Journal of experimental psychology. Applied·2001
Same author

People focus on optimistic scenarios and disregard pessimistic scenarios while predicting task completion times.

Journal of experimental psychology. Applied·2000
Same author

Probability judgment in three-category classification learning.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2000
Same author

Subjective probability of disjunctive hypotheses: local-weight models for decomposition of evidential support.

Cognitive psychology·1999
Same author

Confidence and accuracy in trait inference: judgment by similarity.

Acta psychologica·1996
Same author

Probability judgement in medicine: discounting unspecified possibilities.

Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making·1995
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Generating explanations or imagining scenarios increases belief in that possibility. This occurs because people temporarily assume the hypothesis is true, influencing their evaluation of evidence and information search.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Decision Making
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Experimental manipulations often involve generating explanations or imagining scenarios.
  • Previous research indicates a correlation between these tasks and increased confidence in the imagined possibility.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying increased confidence after explanation or imagination tasks.
  • To determine if assuming a hypothesis's truth is the key factor driving this confidence increase.

Main Methods:

  • Review of existing studies employing explanation and imagination manipulations.
  • Analysis of the cognitive processes involved in these tasks, focusing on hypothesis assumption.

Main Results:

Related Experiment Videos

  • People who generate explanations or imagine possibilities subsequently report higher confidence in those possibilities.
  • This effect is attributed to the temporary assumption of the hypothesis's truth during the task.

Conclusions:

  • Tasks requiring a hypothesis to be treated as true can enhance confidence in that hypothesis.
  • This phenomenon impacts problem representation, evidence evaluation, and information search, potentially at the expense of alternative hypotheses.