| Popis: |
Across psychology there exist innumerable examples of default biases that individuals tend to use when making judgments within specific domains (e.g., the correspondence bias, connectedness goals, stereotypes, etc). By their very nature, these default biases rely on relatively domain-specific knowledge that may not carry over into other domains. Due to its fundamental, low-level nature, evaluation of situations or stimuli as either positive or negative represents a facet of judgment that is pervasive across nearly all domains. Two experiments test the idea that the relative weight individuals give to positives versus negatives – their weighting bias – is an initial default bias that is related to the final judgments and decisions individuals make. In Study 1, participants who had little opportunity to override this default response showed greater correspondence between their weighting bias and their exploration of a novel environment. Study 2 demonstrated that when motivated to mistrust their default response, participants showed no correspondence between their weighting bias and their risk-taking behavior, but strong correspondence when they were motivated to trust their default response. It is argued that in the absence of relevant substantive knowledge, individuals do not act randomly across domains, but instead rely on their fundamental weighting of positives and negatives to navigate these ambiguous situations. |
