Expertise and use of experienced ease or difficulty of recall for social judgments.

Recent research in social cognition indicates that not only can semantic information be used for judgments; phenomenal experiences such as ease or difficulty of recall are often used as well. For example, when people lack the ability or motivation to think carefully about judgments, they can rely on the phenomenal experience of ease (i.e., the availability heuristic). By contrast, when the judgment topic is personally relevant and motivation to process systematically is high, people rely on recalled content instead. This dissertation tested alternative hypotheses regarding the effect of expertise on use of experienced ease or difficulty of recall. On the one hand, research on expertise regarding a personality trait (i.e., self-schematicity) suggests that schematics (experts) should be resistant to contextual influences such as experienced ease or difficulty of recall or recalled content, while aschematics (novices) should be susceptible to those influences. On the other hand, research on expertise in other domains indicates that experts often rely on heuristics while novices must engage in systematic processing to arrive at sufficiently confident judgments on the same task. The latter prediction seems especially likely regarding experienced ease or difficulty of recall. Novices about a topic should find recalling information difficult regardless of the topic's actual frequency or likelihood. Relying on the experience of ease or difficulty of recall under those circumstances would mean risking judgments that reflect their own lack of knowledge. By contrast, experts should be able to assume that the sense of ease or difficulty of recall reflects the topic's actual frequency or likelihood. Three experiments tested these hypotheses, and findings supported the latter hypothesis. In the first experiment, experts (self-schematics) with regard to assertiveness or unassertiveness relied on the experience of ease or difficulty of recall for related self-judgments, while novices (aschematics) systematically processed recalled content. The second and third experiments replicated and extended these findings regarding expertise about Detroit, showing that true aschematics (not knowledgeable enough to be novices) rely on neither recalled content nor the experience of ease or difficulty of recall, probably due to insufficient judgmental confidence, and that experts' judgment strategies are flexible in light of the personal relevance of the judgment task.PhDPsychologySocial psychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131116/2/9825364.pd