A componential investigation of the relation between structural modelling and cognitive accounts of human judgement

Structural modelling and cognitive process approaches have developed rather different accounts of human judgement and decision making. Two hypotheses to explain these differences were evaluated in the context of a judgement task, and formulated in terms of predictions concerning measurement of attribute importance. First, following suggestions made by Billings and Marcus (1983), it was argued that measures of judgement behaviour based on structural modelling reflect cognitive activity late in the judgement process, whereas measures derived from cognitive process approaches reflect cognitive activity early in the process. A new componential judgement task was developed which not only provided estimates of attribute importance based on structural modelling, but also two sets of cognitive process measures based on cognitive components assumed to occur early and late in the judgement process. A greater degree of convergence between approaches was predicted when the cognitive approach was based on activity in the component occurring later in the judgement process. Second, it was argued that in previous research subjects have had unlimited time to make their judgements, reducing the need for attribute importance to provide the dominant basis for determining processing strategy. The present experiment introduced a time pressure condition and, on the basis of previous research, predicted that this would increase the amount of information processing based on attribute importance, thereby increasing the convergence between estimates of attribute importance derived from the two approaches. The first, but not the second hypothesis was supported and the results were discussed in terms of their implications for understanding previous differences between the two approaches to human judgement.