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comparative judgments applies to many domains.
Comparative or relative judgments are more sensitive than categorical or absolute ones.
also more effortful and time-consuming.
there is no way to keep the recommenders accountable for using the scale properly.
This type of matching is noisy because it is crude.
A procedure that compels explicitly comparative judgments is likely to reduce noise.
This chapter focuses on the role of the response
scale as a pervasive source of noise.
Ambiguity in the wording of scales is a general problem.
they are interpreted differently by both speakers and listeners.
punitive award, intended to send the defendant and similar companies a warning.
goals were to test a theory about the psychology of punitive damages
investigate the role of the monetary scale (here dollars) as a main source of noise in this legal institution.
The intensity of the intended punishment will then be matched to the intensity of the outrage.
As expected from the substitution idea, the correlation between the mean ratings of outrage and of punitive intent was a close-to-perfect 0.98 (PC = 94%).
the emotion of outrage is the primary determinant of punitive intent.
intuitions about punitive intent have a retributive aspect,
eye-for-an-eye principle.
These findings highlight a key feature of the process of judgment: the subtle effect of the judgment task on the weighting of different aspects of the evidence.
second goal of the study was to find out why punitive damages are noisy.
differ widely in how they translate their punitive intent onto the scale of dollars.
deviation from the average judgment counts as an error, and these errors are the source of system noise.
system noise can be broken down into level noise and pattern noise.
overall variance of judgments into three elements:
least noisy scale is punitive intent,
outrage scale is distinctly
noisier:
the dollar scale is by far...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We saw earlier that the just values of outrage and punitive intent were almost perfectly correlated, as implied by the outrage hypothesis.
What does it mean for a behavior to be “absolutely outrageous”?
Punitive intent is more specific.
less ambiguous because its upper bound is more clearly specified.
fair amount of agreement among our experimental jurors in their ratings of punitive intent; the ratings were mostly explained by outrage.
dollar measure most closely simulated the courtroom situation, and it was unacceptably noisy.
people share strong intuitions about the ratios of intensity of many subjective experiences and attitudes.
scales that draw on such intuitions ratio scales.
it has a meaningful zero (zero dollars) and is unbounded at the top.
ratio scale (like the dollar scale) can be tied down by a single intermediate anchor (the jargon term is modulus).
As expected, the numbers that observers assigned to lights of different brightness were proportional to the arbitrary anchor they were instructed to adopt.
standard deviation of the observer’s
judgments would also be proportional to the anchor.
appears that people are much more sensitive to the relative value of comparable goods than to their absolute value. The authors of the study named the persistent effect of a single anchor “coherent arbitrariness.”
the absence of guidance from the experimenter, people are forced to make an arbitrary choice when they use the scale for the first time.
judgments to be proportionately large without affecting their relative size.
dollar judgments actually reflect the judges’ punitive intentions. To discover these intentions, we need only replace the absolute dollar values with relative scores.
proportion of noise in the judgments dropped from 94% to 49%
absolute values of the dollar awards are essentially meaningless because they depend on the arbitrary number chosen in the first case.
The assumption implicit in the law is that jurors’ sense of justice will lead them directly from a consideration of an offense to the correct punishment. This assumption is psychological nonsense—
First, the choice of a scale can make a large difference in the amount of noise in judgments, because ambiguous scales are noisy. Second, replacing absolute judgments with relative ones, when feasible, is likely to reduce noise.
Not so with Julie 2.0. What makes this problem difficult is the presence of multiple, conflicting cues.
