Unpacking, repacking, and anchoring: advances in support theory

Support theory represents probability judgment in terms of the support, or strength of evidence, of the focal relative to the alternative hypothesis. It assumes that the judged probability of an event generally increases when its description is unpacked into disjoint components (implicit subadditivity). This article presents a significant extension of the theory in which the judged probability of an explicit disjunction is less than or equal to the sum of the judged probabilities of its disjoint components (explicit subadditivity). Several studies of probability and frequency judgment demonstrate both implicit and explicit subadditivity. The former is attributed to enhanced availability, whereas the latter is attributed to repacking and anchoring.