Abstract
There are many tasks in which people are called on to disregard information that they have already processed. Dealing with inadmissible evidence in a courtroom setting, second-guessing the past, and responding to experimental psychologists' debriefing instructions are three tasks of this type; in all these cases, people have been found to experience considerable difficulty. The present experiment investigates these difficulties in a general form, using almanactype questions. Subjects told the correct answers to such questions were found to overestimate both how much they would have known about the answer had they not been told and how much they actually did know about the answer before being told. Attempts to undo this knew-it-all-along effect by exhorting subjects to work harder or telling them about the bias failed. These results were discussed in terms of how the structure of one's knowledge is altered to accommodate new information.
Keywords
PsychologyComputer science
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
EFFECTS OF INSTRUCTIONS AND REINFORCEMENT‐FEEDBACK ON HUMAN OPERANT BEHAVIOR MAINTAINED BY FIXED‐INTERVAL REINFORCEMENT<sup>1</sup>
In three experiments, human subjects were trained on a five‐component multiple schedule with different fixed intervals of monetary reinforcement scheduled in the different compo...
Investment Under Uncertainty.
How should firms decide whether and when to invest in new capital equipment, additions to their workforce, or the development of new products? Why have traditional economic mode...
Survey Questions: Handcrafting the Standardized Questionnaire
This book reviews the experimental literature on how survey questions behave as well as the lore of professional experience and culls from them those guiding principles and spec...
Systems for grading the quality of evidence and the strength of recommendations II: Pilot study of a new system
Abstract Background Systems that are used by different organisations to grade the quality of evidence and the strength of recommendations vary. They have different strengths and...
ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language\n Representations
Increasing model size when pretraining natural language representations often\nresults in improved performance on downstream tasks. However, at some point\nfurther model increas...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1977
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 349-358
- Citations
- 389
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
389
OpenAlex
Cite This
Baruch Fischhoff
(1977).
Perceived informativeness of facts..
Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance
, 3
(2)
, 349-358.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.3.2.349
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1037/0096-1523.3.2.349