Latent connectives in human decision making

Abstract

The interpretation of a decision as the intersection of fuzzy sets, computed by applying either the minimum or the product operator to the membership functions of the fuzzy sets concerned implies that there is no compensation between low and high degrees of membership. If, on the other hand, a decision is defined to be the union of fuzzy sets, represented by the maximum or algebraic sum of the degrees of membership, full compensation is assumed. Managerial decisions hardly even represent any of these extremes. The aggregation of subjective categories in the framework of human decisions or evaluations almost always shows some degree of compensation. This indicates that human beings partially are using non-verbal aggregation procedures which do not correspond to the verbal and logical connectives ‘and’ and ‘or’. The results of our experiments support the hypothesis that people often use compensatory procedures. Several well-known operators are tested. However, they do not predict our data very well. Therefore a new class of operators is suggested which varies with respect to a parameter of compensation. Our data do confirm this concept.