Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making - Schwartz - 2004 - Article

Most theories think that we form judgments on the basis of information that is available at that time. According to this, we should evaluate something more favourable when more positive characteristics come to mind. However, it is not just that simple. Sometimes information can’t be brought that easily to mind and new information can’t be processed as easily as old information. Because of this, judgments and decisions deviate from what we might predict on basis of accessible information. Subjective experiences seem to add implications to the making of the decision and usually the decision will be the opposite to what the accessible information seems to imply. Accessible information, metacognitive experiences, the perceived information value of these experiences and the naive theories used to interpret these things can cause complexities.

What if somebody asked you to make a list of the ten best cafeterias in Amsterdam. The first two will probably come quickly to mind, but the other eight might be difficult to recall. What will this difficulty tell you? That you don’t know many cafeterias? That you don’t know much about Amsterdam? That you have other things in mind and can’t concentrate on the cafeterias? All these things cause a difficulty of recall. One naive theory will use as explanation that it is easy to recall things when there are many things. Another naive theory suggests that it is hard to recall things when you are preoccupied with something else. These different theories may have different conclusions.

One study asked participants to recall either six or twelve examples of their assertive or unassertive behaviour and afterwards they were asked to rate their assertiveness. When people were asked to recall six things, they rated themselves as more assertive after recalling the assertive things than after recalling the unassertive things. But when people were asked to recall 12 things, the opposite effect happened. People who were asked to recall 12 examples of assertive behaviour rated themselves as less assertive than people who were asked to recall 12 examples of unassertive behaviour. People who recalled 12 assertive behaviours rated themselves as less assertive than people who had to recall 6 assertive behaviours. Because it was more difficult to come up with twelve examples than with six, people felt that they were not as assertive after all, or else it wouldn’t be so difficult to come up with 12 examples.

Naive theories

One of the naive theories mentioned before, is that the more exemplars exist, the easier it is to bring some to mind. Frequent exemplars are easy to bring to mind, therefore frequent and also more typical for their category. Examples that come to mind are relatively typical. Experienced ease of recall resulted in judgments that were consistent with recalled content and difficulty of recall resulted in judgments opposite to the recalled content. One study found that students liked Tony Blair more when they had to recall a few rather than many favourable thoughts about him.

Another study found that students reported using their bicycle more often after recalling a few rather than many instances of bicycle use. Another set of naive theories is about representations in memory. Categories that are well represented in memory are easier to recall than categories that are not well represented in memory. When people can recall things more easily, they will be more positive about the thing recalled. One study found that people were more positive about their childhood when they were asked to recall four childhood events than twelve childhood events. People think that when things are more important to them they are also better represented in their memory than things that are unimportant. Accessibility seems to be connected with personal relevance and judgments of interest. There are also multiple naive theories. These are combinations of the previous mentioned theories. One study showed that the ease of recall increases when people’s confidence in the recall increases. Higher confidence in the recalled can come into existence because there are many examples, because the person pays much attention to the question, because the person knows much about the subject or because the person has a good memory about the subject. There are different naive theories that can be used, but sometimes you can draw wrong conclusions when you use one theory to explain certain things. When you are asked to recall many examples of an event and you can’t find many, you may think that there aren’t many, that the events happened a long time ago, that your memory is poor for the certain event, that you are not very interested in the subject and so on. Some explanation excludes the others, while sometimes you may also choose the wrong explanation.