Rich and famous: recognition-based judgment in the Sunday Times rich list

Rich and Famous: Recognition-based judgment in the Sunday Times Rich List Rachel McCloy (r.a.mccloy@reading.ac.uk) Department of Psychology, University of Reading Earley Gate, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AL UK C. Philip Beaman (c.p.beaman@reading.ac.uk) Department of Psychology, University of Reading Earley Gate, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AL UK Kate Goddard (k.goddard@reading.ac.uk) Department of Psychology, University of Reading Earley Gate, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AL UK limited range of choice tasks. Even studies critical of the special status of recognition in decision-making (e.g., McCloy & Beaman, 2004; Newell & Shanks, 2004; Oppenheimer, 2003) have employed, to a large extent, the same basic task. Goldstein and Gigerenzer’s (1996) “drosophila” environment for recognition-based choice is a two-alternative forced choice task (2AFC) where people are presented with the names of two cities and asked to judge which of the two is the larger. Both the 2AFC task and the city choice domain have been used almost exclusively in studies exploring Goldstein and Gigerenzer’s recognition heuristic (e.g., McCloy & Beaman, 2004; Oppenheimer, 2003; Reimer & Katsikopoulos, 2004). One aim of the current paper is to further consider the generality of recognition heuristic by extending its consideration to a new and potentially fruitful domain - that of the Sunday Times Rich List. Theoretically, the recognition heuristic should generalize across all domains of magnitude judgment. However, some domains seem intuitively more likely to encourage such heuristic-based inference than others. Abstract Recognition as a cue to judgment in a novel, multi-option domain (the Sunday Times Rich List) is explored. As in previous studies, participants were found to make use of name recognition as a cue to the presumed wealth of individuals. Names that were recognized were judged to be the richest name from amongst the set presented at above chance levels. This effect persisted across situations in which more than one name was recognized; recognition was used as an inclusion criterion for the sub-set of names to be considered the richest of the set presented. However, when the question was reversed, and a “poorest” judgment was required, use of recognition as an exclusion criterion was observed only when a single name was recognized. Reaction times when making these judgments also show a distinction between “richest” and “poorest” questions with recognition of none of the options taking the longest time to judge in the “richest” question condition and full recognition of all the names presented taking longest to judge in the “poorest” question condition. Implications for decision-making using simple heuristics are discussed. Rich and Famous Introduction People who are well-known or famous, as a general rule, tend to be wealthier than people who are not famous. If asked which of two people is the wealthier, it may therefore be rational to choose recognized names over unrecognized names, i.e., to apply a recognition heuristic. The area of fame and wealth should be an interesting domain in which to study recognition-based choice. Each year, the Sunday Times newspaper in the United Kingdom prints an ordered list of the 1000 richest people in the country, alongside several additional lists (e.g., 100 richest people under 30 year old). As the wealth of the people on this list comes from a wide range of sources (e.g., business, inheritance, entertainment) there is scope for wide variation in recognition, not only across the people named, but also across participants in any experiment (depending on their areas of interest). This makes it a very rich domain in which to study the impact that recognition has on judgments of magnitude - in this case the relative wealth of the people under consideration. In addition to checking whether the Recognition-based choice has been argued to be a fundamental component of “fast and frugal” decision- making (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999; 2002). In situations where the probability of recognition correlates well with the criterion of interest (e.g., judgments of city size), people who have the opportunity to base their judgments purely on recognition - those who recognize some, but not all, of the names presented to them - have been shown to be at an advantage relative to those who recognize all the names. This latter, ostensibly well-informed group must rely on some other criterion for judgment (Borges, Goldstein, Ortmann & Gigerenzer, 1999; Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999). Recognition guided judgments are said to employ a “recognition heuristic” wherein, in the absence of other cues, recognition is used as the basis for inferences of size or magnitude. Such recognition-based judgments have, however, only been studied in a limited number of domains, and using a