associative strongprocessesstrong in intuitive judgment - carey morewedge.pdfVIP

Opinion Associative processes in intuitive judgment Carey K. Morewedge1 and Daniel Kahneman2 1 Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, 208 Porter Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA 2 Center for Health and Wellbeing, Princeton University, Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA Dual-system models of reasoning attribute errors of this new knowledge to explain major phenomena of intui- judgment to two failures: the automatic operations of tive judgment. a ‘System 1’ generate a faulty intuition, which the con- It is often useful to think of judgments as a weighted trolled operations of a ‘System 2’ fail to detect and combination of items of information [13]. In this scheme, correct. We identify System 1 with the automatic oper- judgment biases can always be described as an overweight- ations of associative memory and draw on research in ing of some aspects of the information and underweighting the priming paradigm to describe how it operates. We or neglect of others, relative to a criterion of accuracy or explain how three features of associative memory – logical consistency [7]. We offer an uncontroversial hypoth- associative coherence, attribute substitution and pro- esis – strongly activated information is likely to be given cessing fluency – give rise to major biases of intuitive more weight than it deserves and relevant knowledge that judgment. Our article highlights both the ability of Sys- is not activated by the associative context will be under- tem 1 to create complex and skilled judgments and the weighted or neglected (e.g. [14,15]). In this fashion, the role of the system as a source