Structural Determinants of Cue Utilization in Judgment.

The report summarizes three years of research on the differential use of multiple cues in human judgment. The structural properties of judgment tasks were of particular interest in this work. These include such properties as patterns of importance among cues, information display, response mode, etc. It was found that many structural characteristics that should be irrelevant to cue utilization nevertheless have strong psychological relevance for human judges. This stems from the fact that structural characteristics influence the complexity of the information-processing operations required of a judge and thus cause him to change his cue utilization systematically in order to reduce cognitive strain. Author