The Role of Part-Set Cuing and Retrieval Induced Forgetting in Subjective Probability Judgments

Abstract

A fundamental assumption of support theory is that unpacking an implicit disjunctive hypothesis into its component hypotheses increases its perceived likelihood compared to ratings of the implicit disjunction (Tversky & Koehler, 1994). However, recent work by Sloman et al. (2004) revealed that cuing participants with atypical exemplars from a category led to decreases in perceived likelihood. Three interpretations of this typicality effect are reviewed and three experiments are reported that examine these interpretations. Experiment 1 replicated the Sloman et al. (2004) findings but the generation data indicate that the judgment results may be due to a misinterpretation of the question. Experiment 2 adapted the retrieval-induced-forgetting paradigm and found that unpacking the implicit disjunction is affected by retrieval inducement processes, and the subjective probability judgments may be better accounted for by an averaging model. Experiment 3 indicates that these typicality effects are not observed within small judgment sets.