When one cue is not enough: Combining fast and frugal heuristics with compound cue processing

Abstract

One-reason decision-making heuristics as proposed by Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group (1999) have been shown to perform accurately. However, such strategies cannot deal with compound cues. We propose the Take The Best Configural Cue (TTB-Configural) as a fast and frugal heuristic that processes compound cues. In a series of three experiments, we analysed whether participants used this heuristic when making cue-based inferences on which of two alternatives had a higher criterion value. In two of the experiments, two cues were amalgamated into a valid compound cue by applying the AND or the OR logical rule, respectively. In the third experiment, there was no valid compound cue. Within each experiment, we also manipulated causal mental models through instructions. In the configural causal model, cues were said to act through the same causal mechanism. In the elemental causal model, cues were said to act through different causal mechanisms. In the neutral causal model, the causal mechanism was not specified. When a highly valid compound existed, and participants had a configural causal model, for the majority of them the strategy that could best account for their choices was TTB-Configural. Otherwise, the strategy that best predicted their choices was the Take The Best (TTB) heuristic.

We thank Chris White, Peter Todd, Jörg Rieskamp, Ben Newell, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and Klaus Fiedler for his helpful literature suggestions. We thank Manuel M. Ramos for his help in writing the program for the experiments. We also thank Anita Todd and Donna Alexander for editing the manuscript.

Notes

¹ Consider a simple environment with two binary-valued cues, A and B, and one binary-valued event, E. For simplicity, let us consider a deterministic environment (although our point could easily be generalized to probabilistic relationships). Let E = 1 occur with probability 1 when both A = 1 and B = 1 and with probability 0 whenever any of the three other cue patterns occur. This would be the usual AND logical rule. To make it simple, let each of the four cue patterns occur with equal frequency. This environment is linearly separable and partially configural. Using the linear modelling technique where P(E|C) = W₀ + W_A + W_B + W_A,B, and applying parsimony to put as much weight as possible into the lower order terms, they are all ± .25. This cannot be done with the interaction term (W_A,B) being zero. The XOR logical rule would be nonlinearly separable and completely configural.

² In these environments, the discrimination rate—that is, the number of pairs in which cue values differ between alternatives—was kept constant at a value of .60 for the individual cues and .30 for the compound cues. We also ensured that the validity of all possible noncritical compounds AC and BC, and even ABC if applicable, were neither higher than .60 nor lower than .40. The same holds for nonlinearly separable logical rules, such as the XOR and not-XOR.