Ease of retrieval as a source of information in social change judgments

Abstract

Several authors have proposed two alternative sources of information in memory based judgments: the contents retrieved from memory and the ease with which the retrieval process is perceived. Schwarz and colleagues have made it clear that, in certain circumstances, people base their judgments on the subjective experience of ease with which the information is retrieved. The present work studies the extent to which the use of this heuristic could be generalized to judgments of social change (Study 1) and some of the factors that can affect the ability to diagnose the ease of retrieval as a source of information (Study 2). The results obtained confirm the ability to generalize this heuristic to judgments of social change and to establish some conditions that affect the diagnostic- city of this source of information.