Cognitive skills in judgment: Subjects' ability to use information about weights, function forms, and organizing principles

Abstract Subjects' ability to use information about weights, function forms, and organizing principles in judgment was investigated in five experiments. The results of the first experiment showed that subjects are able to apply weights to cues with great proficiency, and replicated earlier results showing that subjects tend to interpret weights in terms of slopes, rather than variance accounted for. The second experiment showed that a given set of weights could be used for both linear and nonlinear cues, and the third experiment that integrating information from a linear and a nonlinear cue is not harder than integrating cues of the same kind. The fourth and fifth experiments showed that subjects have great problems in using configural rules for integrating information from two cues. This may explain why configurality is not often found in studies of clinical judgment.