The use of Heuristic in General Responses
Stephanie Metry
Australian Catholic University

Tutor: Dr Nicole Ridley
Tutorial time: Thursday 11am
Due date: 28th April 2015
Word count:

Abstract

In the past, researchers have found that there is a range of heuristics that people use to make decisions when they do not have access to all the necessary information. One of the most recognized heuristic is called recognition heuristic. Oppenheimer (2003) suggests that recognition heuristic is when an individual only recognises one of the two items, the individual will judge the recognised item to be greater in whatever dimensions are positively correlated with recognition. This then puts forward that if we do not know the answer to a question, we are more likely to select the answer that we recognise rather than an answer that we do not recognise. Many studies have been conducted to examine the effects of recognition on our ability to determine things such as which of the two cities is the state capital. In these studies, Goldstein & gigerenzer (2002) required their participants to choose the largest German city in each pair. Each participant was asked to check the names of the cities he or she recognised off a list. From this recognition information, they calculated how often each participant had an opportunity to choose in accordance with the recognition heuristic and compared this number with how often they actually did. Interestingly, findings indicated that there was strong support for the recognition and students tend to choose the most familiar answer (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002). In his study, Oppenheimer (2003) presented participants with towns or cities that were local to them and that were known to be small, students were made forced-choice judgements of a city population size. Oppenheimer’s participants proved smarter than the recognition heuristic by choosing the recognised city significantly less often than would be expected by chance. In other words, participants tend to choose the more familiar answer if you have the knowledge for it.

A similar study to Goldstein & Gigerenzer (2002) and Oppenheimer (2003) was conducted in 2006 by Serwe, Sascha; Frings, Christian. They tested performance of the recognition heuristic in a dynamic environment and used it to predict the outcomes of tennis matches in Wimbledon in 2003. Recognition data of amateur tennis player and laypeople was used to build recognition rankings. Simulations of individual choices showed high recognition of both amateurs and laypeople. They found that overall recognition heuristic maybe be effectively generalised to dynamic environments (Serwe, Frings et al; 2006). Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) and Oppenheimer (2003) only explored the impact of recognition heuristic when determining the population of a city. Our study aimed to see whether the recognition heuristic would apply in an additional context such as identifying the capital city of a country. The aim of this current study was to examine the effects of recognition on our ability to determine which of the two cities is the state capital. It was predicted that the number of correct responses in the condition where the capital is the most recognisable city will be higher than in the condition where the most recognisable city is not the capital
Method
Participants Four hundred and ninety eight first year psychology students from four campuses (Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, and Strathfield) of Australian Catholic University participated in the study. The participants mean age was 20.50 (S.D. = 6.51). A percentage of 73.1% of females participated and the rest were males. Data for this project was generated from the voluntary participation students of the PSYC100 tutorial class. Their occupation was either studying full or part time at the Australian Catholic University.
Materials
The materials