Birnbaum raised important challenges to testing transitivity. We summarize why an approach based on counting response patterns does not solve these challenges. Foremost, we show why parsimonious tests of transitivity require at least 5 choice alternatives. While the approach of Regenwetter, Dana, and Davis-Stober achieves high power with modest…

A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data…

Individuals are typically more likely to continue to interact with people if they have a positive impression of them. This article shows how this sequential sampling feature of impression formation can explain several biases in impression formation. The underlying mechanism is the sample bias generated when the probability of interaction depends…

The article by W. K. Estes marks a turning point in the mathematical learning theory movement. The central constructs were stimulus variability, stimulus sampling, and stimulus response association by contiguity, in a framework enabling prediction of response probability and latency. (SLD)