Detecting and Reacting to Change: The Effect of Exposure to Narrow Categorizations

Amitav Chakravarti, Christina Fang and Zur Shapira

Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract: The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people’s reactions to change. In this article we document a novel effect: Decision makers’ reactions to a change (e.g., a visual change, a technology change) were systematically affected by the type of categorizations they encountered in an unrelated prior task (e.g., the response categories associated with a survey question). We found that prior exposure to narrow, as opposed to broad, categorizations improved decision makers’ ability to detect change and led to stronger reactions to a given change. These differential reactions occurred because the prior categorizations, even though unrelated, altered the extent to which the subsequently presented change was perceived as either a relatively large change or a relatively small one.

Pages: 8 pages
Date: 2011-08
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Published in Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning, Memory, and Cognition

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