Do people treat missing information adaptively when making inferences?

摘要

When making inferences, people are often confronted with situations with incomplete information.Previous research has led to a mixed picture about how people react to missing information. Optionsinclude ignoring missing information, treating it as either positive or negative, using the average ofpast observations for replacement, or using the most frequent observation of the available informationas a placeholder. The accuracy of these inference mechanisms depends on characteristics of theenvironment. When missing information is uniformly distributed, it is most accurate to treat it asthe average, whereas when it is negatively correlated with the criterion to be judged, treatingmissing information as if it were negative is most accurate. Whether people treat missing informationadaptively according to the environment was tested in two studies. The results show that participantswere sensitive to how missing information was distributed in an environment and most frequentlyselected the mechanism that was most adaptive. From these results the authors conclude that reactingto missing information in different ways is an adaptive response to environmental characteristics.