Nancy Pennington

Explaining the evidence: Tests of the Story Model for juror decision making.

This research investigates the Story Model, Pennington and Hasties (1986, 1988) explanationbased theory of decision making for juror decisions. In Experiment 1, varying the ease with which stories could be constructed affected verdict judgments and the impact of credibility evidence. Memory for evidence in all conditions was equivalent, implying that the story structure was a mediator of decisions and of the impact of credibility evidence. In Experiments 2 and 3, Ss evaluated the evidence in 3 ways. When Ss made a global judgment at the end of the case, their judgment processes followed the prescriptions of the Story Model, not of Bayesian or linear updating models. When Ss made item-by-item judgments after each evidence block, linear anchor and adjust models described their judgments. In conditions in which story construction strategies were more likely to be used, story completeness had greater effects on decisions.

Cognitive Approaches to Judgment and Decision Making

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses that the cognitive approach to judgment and decision making behavior is gradually developing and expanding in scope and in number of adherents. It presents a collection of experimental methods and results from one laboratory studying several different judgment tasks to illustrate some major trends that are central in the cognitive approach: evidence representation in the form of a model or explanation of the decision situation, enhanced memory for decision-relevant information after a decision has been made, and adaptive flexibility in individual decision strategies in response to variations in task conditions. One obstacle for the development of cognitive theories of judgment and decision making behavior is that there are considerable differences among the theories that are called cognitive. This situation is probably good for the eventual development of cognitive theories, but it is troublesome for individual researchers, especially those who are currently attempting to spread the faith to new task domains. In the field of judgment and decision making, it is essential to think about the relationships between alternate theoretical developments and formulations based on traditional expected utility theory. The expectation is that the crucible of empirical evaluation forces all of the approaches to converge on a common theoretical framework. The chapter describes that cognitive precepts are core of the next generation of theories of judgment and decision making.