Partition Priming in Judgment Under Uncertainty

We show that likelihood judgments are biased toward an ignorance-prior probability that assigns equal credence to each mutually exclusive event considered by the judge. The value of the ignorance prior depends crucially on how the set of possibilities (i.e., the state space) is subjectively partitioned by the judge. For instance, asking “what is the probability that Sunday will be hotter than any other day next week?” facilitates a two-fold case partition, (Sunday hotter, Sunday not hotter), thus priming an ignorance prior of 1/2. In contrast, asking “what is the probability that the hottest day of the week will be Sunday?” facilitates a seven-fold class partition, (Sunday hottest, Monday hottest, etc.), priming an ignorance prior of 1/7. In four studies, we observed systematic partition dependence: Judgments made by participants presented with either case or class formulations of the same query were biased toward the corresponding ignorance prior.

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