The effect of categories on relative encoding biases in memory-based judgments

Abstract

People are very good at making relative judgments (determining where a stimulus ranks in a distribution) but not very good at making absolute judgments (determining the absolute properties of the stimulus independent of context). Thus, when evaluating various stimuli, people tend to encode ordinal rank rather than objective quality. This leads to a robust bias in memory-based judgments: when the nature of the distribution shifts, people fail to update their memories of ordinal rank, and thus incorrectly judge a stimulus that is at the top [bottom] of the distribution at Time 1 to also be at the top [bottom] of a different distribution at Time 2. In two studies, we demonstrate a crucial moderator of the relative encoding bias on memory-based judgments: category saliency at the time of encoding. More specifically, we reveal that this memory-based judgment bias is reduced if it is made salient at the time of encoding that the stimuli from Time 1 and Time 2 are from different categories and thus different distributions.