Retrieval fluency can affect the metacognitive judgments people make about their memory. In a study by Benjamin, Bjork, and Schwartz (1998), participants predicted they would be better able to recall the answers to questions they retrieved more quickly than the answers to questions they retrieved more slowly, despite actual performance going in…

Individuals should "strategically" shift decision criteria when there are disproportionate likelihoods or consequences for falsely identifying versus missing target items. Despite being explicitly aware of the advantages for criterion shifting, people on "average" do not shift extremely, leading many theories to conclude that…

Previous research is mixed regarding whether laypeople are sensitive to sample size. Here the author argues that this is in part because sample size sensitivity follows a curvilinear function with decreasing sensitivity as sample size become larger. This functional form reconciles apparent discrepancies in the literature, accounting for results…

Theoretical accounts of risky choice framing effects assume that decision makers interpret framing options as extensionally equivalent, such that if 600 lives are at stake, saving 200 implies that 400 die. However, many scholars have argued that framing effects are caused, instead, by filling in pragmatically implied information. This linguistic…

Individuals can partly recreate the "wisdom of crowds" within their own minds by combining nonredundant estimates they themselves have generated. Herzog and Hertwig (2009) showed that this accuracy gain could be boosted by urging people to actively think differently when generating a 2nd estimate ("dialectical bootstrapping").…