Creating Algorithms as an Aid to Judgment. Part 2

摘要

Previous research has shown that subjects improve their performance in estimatingunknown quantities when they are asked to write algorithms about these quantities. These algorithms are short combination rules whereby the subjects decompose the unknown quantities into a series of other quantities that they can more easily estimate and then use these estimates to arrive at an estimate of the requested quantity. This paper extends this research by exploring the effectiveness of asking subjects to work the algorithm they create not once, but twice, first using low estimates for the component parts and again using high estimates for the component parts. This study shows that subjects can be trained to create algorithms, but that the use of algorithms does not improve their performance to any great degree. When successful, the technique of creating an algorithm and using it to make two estimates led to very accurate performance (93% correct). But the technique also badly misled subjects on some occasions, bringing down the overall performance. Keywords: Knowledge retrieval, Decomposed quantitative judgements. (Author)(kr)