Interpersonal comparison of subjective probabilities: Toward translating linguistic probabilities

From: Memory & Cognition | Date: September 1, 2005| Author: | Copyright information

Interpersonal variability in understanding linguistic probabilities can adversely affect decision making. Using the fact that everyone judges canonical probability events similarly in a manner consistent with axiom systems that yield a probability measure, we developed and tested a method for comparing the meanings of probability phrases across individuals. An experiment demonstrated that despite extreme heterogeneity in participants' linguistic probability lexicons, interpersonal similarity in phrase meaning is well predicted by phrase rank order within the lexicons. Thus, equally ranked ...

Read all of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research

Related newspaper, magazine, and trade journal articles from HighBeam Research

(Including press releases, facts, information, and biographies)

Predicting binary choices from probability phrase meanings
; ...1988; Erev & Cohen, 1990; Oison &Budescu, 1997). Despite the considerable research...different probability lexicons (see, e.g., Budescu, Weinberg, & Wallsten, 1988; Dhami...Erev & Cohen, 1990; Karelitz & Budescu, 2004). For example, hi Dhami and Wallsten...
Predicting World Cup results: Do goals seem more likely when they pay off?
; Bar-Hillel and Budescu (1995) failed to find a desirability...the contestants (see also Fischer & Budescu, 1995). Typically, fans inflated the...consequence of wishful thinking. Bar-Hillel and Budescu (1995) called the causal link between...
`The Probability of God': Hedge bets, go directly to heaven.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
; ...some complicated matters well worth learning about. It is useful, for instance, to know that, in contrast to fuzzy linguistic probabilities ( the probability that my client was nowhere near the scene of the crime), mathematical probabilities have very clearly...
Words or numbers? (use of verbal and numerical expressions to communicate risk)
; ...thought process of real experts. A good example of how risk management practice can benefit from the formalization of linguistic probabilities using computers is the Retention Evaluation Program (REP). The REP is a simple expert system that evaluates loss retention...
`The Probability of God': Hedge bets, go directly to heaven.
; ...some complicated matters well worth learning about. It is useful, for instance, to know that, in contrast to fuzzy linguistic probabilities ( the probability that my client was nowhere near the scene of the crime), mathematical probabilities have very clearly...
Profile: Public's risk perception not based on simple arithmetic
; ...people judge risks, there are lots of factors to weigh. David Budescu, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, says two of...likely an event is and how severe it's likely to be. Dr. DAVID BUDESCU (Psychologist, University of Illinois): Probably, in most people...
The Contribution of a Simple Decision Process (SDP) to Reducing Biases in Educational Decisions
; ...response to unconventional situations (Khatri & Ng, 2000; Morera & Budescu, 2001). Because such decisions tap into information residing in subconscious...called the compensatory procedure and decompositional strategy (Morera & Budescu
Using the Rasch model to quantify the causal effect of test instructions
; ...omitted answers-were mostly fulfilled. Budescu and Bar-Hillel (1993) compared S^sub 1...some implications of the instructions. Budescu and Bar-Hillel (1993) concluded that S...the advantage of the risk-taking ones (Budescu & Bar-Hillel, 1993). From a technical...
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH FOR EVALUATING VARIABLES IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
; ...yet related purposes: prediction and explanation (Azen & Budescu, 2003; Courville & Thompson, 2001; Johnson & LeBreton...involve elements of both prediction and explanation (Azen & Budescu, 2003). This is especially true in the organizational sciences...
A simple and logical alternative for making PERT time estimates. (Program Evaluation and Review Technique)
; ...probability distributions (see, for example, Hampton et al., 1973; Chesley, 1975; Spetzler and Stael von Holstein, 1975; Wallsten and Budescu, 1983). From this literature, it is apparent that the most straightforward and common method for eliciting T's subjective probability...