One of the oldest hypotheses in cognitive psychology is that controlled information integration1 is a serial, capacity-constrained process that is delimited by our working memory resources, and this seems to be the most uncontroversial aspect also of present-day dual-systems theories (Evans, 2008). The process is typically conceived of as a sequential adjustment of an estimate of a criterion (e.g., a probability), in view of successive consideration of inputs to the judgment (i.e., cues or evidence). The “cognitive default” seems to be to consider each attended cue in isolation, taking its impact on the criterion into account by adjusting a previous estimate into a new estimate, until a stopping rule applies (e.g., Juslin et al., 2008). Considering each input in isolation, without modifying the adjustments contingently on other inputs to the judgment, invites additive integration. The limits on working memory moreover contribute to an illusion of linearity. If people, when pondering the relationship between variables X and Y, are constrained by working memory to consider only two X–Y pairs, the function induced can take no other form than a line. As illustrated by many scientific models, with computational aids people can capture also non-additive and non-linear relations. But without support, this is rather taxing on working memory and additive integration, typically as a weighted average, seems to be the default process (Juslin et al., 2009), and, even more so, considering that additive integration is famously “robust” (Dawes, 1979), allowing little marginal benefit from also considering the putative configural effects of cues. These cognitive constraints therefore define a point toward which our judgments naturally gravitate. This simplistic and probably not overly controversial model of controlled integration immediately has important consequences for our abilities to make judgments, some of which are well-known, some of which may still need to be further digested. At a general level, the most fundamental constraint on people's ability to comprehend and control their environment is this tendency to view it in terms of an “additive caricature,” as if they “looked at the world through a straw,” appreciating each factor in isolation, but with limited ability to capture the interactions and dynamics of the entire system. In more prosaic terms, a wealth of evidence suggests that multiple-cue judgments are typically well described by simple linear additive models (Brehmer, 1994; Karelaia and Hogarth, 2008), even if the task departs from linearity and additivity. There are important exceptions where people transcend this imprisonment in a linear additive mental universe also without external computational aids, in particular, an ability to use a prior input to “contextualize” the meaning of an immediately following input. For example, for a lottery, like a 0.10 chance of winning $100 and $0 otherwise, people have little difficulty with contextualizing the outcome in view of the preceding probability; that is, to discount the “appeal” of the positive outcome of receiving $100 by the fact that the probability of ever seeing it is low. Likewise, people often have little difficulty with understanding normalized probability ratios and appreciate that, say, “30 chances in 100” and “300 chances in 1000” describe comparable states of uncertainty, something that again requires that one input is contextualized by another2. These exceptions are important, but seem to be connected to specific judgment domains.
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