The Effect of Collective Transitions on the Organization and Contents of Autobiographical Memory: A Transition Theory Perspective.

In this article, we tirst outline a minimalist approach to the organization ot autobiographical memory called transition theory. This theory assumes that the content and organization of autobiographical memory mirror the structure of experience and reflect the operation of basic memory processes. Thus, this approach rests on an analysis of the environment that emphasizes repetition, co-occurrence, change, and distinctiveness. We then report a study that tested a set of predictions derived from transition theory. The predictions concerned both the temporal distribution of memorable personal events and the use of public events and historical periods to date those events. To test these predictions, we collected word-cued memories, event-dating protocols, and historical relatedness ratings from 2 groups of Bosnians; on average, people in the younger group were in their early 40s at the outset of the Siege of Sarajevo (1992); those in the older group were in their mid-50s when they experienced this collective transition. As predicted, participants in both groups produced a robust living-in-history effect, often (-25%) referring to the civil war or the Siege of Sarajevo when dating event memories. They also displayed an upheaval bump, recalling more events from the war years than from prewar and postwar years, and a reminiscence bump, recalling more events from late adolescence and early adulthood than from earlier or later periods. Finally, this study demonstrated, for the first time, the existence of a before/after effect. Specifically, participants often mentioned the war when dating historically unrelated events for the prewar and postwar years. We conclude by considering extensions of transition theory and the significance of our findings for existing models of autobiographical memory.

When "bad" is good: How evaluative judgments eliminate the standard anchoring effect.

Early accounts of judgmental anchoring attribute the effect to a deliberate, but insufficient, adjustment process; more recent theories point to automatic, priming-based processes as the underlying cause. In this article we introduce a novel anchor assessment manipulation and a decompositional analysis of the standard anchoring effect to determine the extent to which anchoring is driven by automatic versus deliberate processes. Prior to providing a target estimate, participants indicated whether the target was greater or less than the anchor, or whether the anchor would make a good or bad target estimate. Contrary to predictions of priming-based accounts, the decomposition of the anchoring effect revealed that participants generally provided estimates consistent with their prior assessment; in particular, anchoring was eliminated when participants considered the anchor to be a bad target estimate. These findings challenge the view of anchoring as an inevitable bias of numerical judgment and indicate that people have significant control over how they manage numerical information in judgments under uncertainty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Magnitude comparison extended: how lack of knowledge informs comparative judgments under uncertainty.

How do people compare quantitative attributes of real-world objects? (e.g., Which country has the higher per capita GDP, Mauritania or Nepal?). The research literature on this question is divided: Although researchers in the 1970s and 1980s assumed that a 2-stage magnitude comparison process underlies these types of judgments (Banks, 1977), more recent approaches emphasize the role of probabilistic cues and simple heuristics (Gigerenzer, Todd, & The ABC Research Group, 1999). In this article, we review the magnitude comparison literature and propose a framework for magnitude comparison under uncertainty (MaC). Predictions from this framework were tested in a choice context involving one recognized and one unrecognized object, and were contrasted with those based on the recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002). This was done in 2 paired-comparison studies. In both, participants were timed as they decided which of 2 countries had the higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Consistent with the MaC account, we found that response times (RTs) displayed a classic symbolic distance effect: RTs were inversely related to the difference between the subjective per capita GDPs of the compared countries. Furthermore, choice of the recognized country became more frequent as subjective difference increased. These results indicate that the magnitude comparison process extends to choice contexts that have previously been associated only with cue-based strategies. We end by discussing how several findings reported in the recent heuristics literature relate to the MaC framework.