Attribute substitution
Encyclopedia
Attribute substitution is a psychological process thought to underlie a number of cognitive bias
es and perceptual illusions
. It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic
attribute. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system. Hence, when someone tries to answer a difficult question, they may actually answer a related but different question, without realizing that a substitution has taken place. This explains why individuals can be unaware of their own biases, and why biases persist even when the subject is made aware of them. It also explains why human judgments often fail to show regression toward the mean
.
The theory of attribute substitution unifies a number of separate explanations of reasoning errors in terms of cognitive heuristics. In turn, the theory is subsumed by an effort-reduction framework proposed by Anuj K. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, which states that people use a variety of techniques to reduce the effort of making decisions.
In a 1974 paper, psychologists Amos Tversky
and Daniel Kahneman
had argued that a broad family of biases (systematic errors in judgment and decision) were explainable in terms of a few heuristics (information-processing shortcuts), including availability
and representativeness
. In a 2002 revision of the theory, Kahneman and Shane Frederick
proposed attribute substitution as a process underlying these and other effects.
In 1975, psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens
proposed that the strength of a stimulus (e.g. the brightness of a light, the severity of a crime) is encoded neurally in a way that is independent of modality
. Kahneman and Frederick built on this idea, arguing that the target attribute and heuristic attribute could be very different in nature.
picture, their apparent sizes can be distorted by the 3D context, making a convincing optical illusion. The theory states that the three-dimensional size of the figure (which is accessible because it is automatically computed by the visual system) is substituted for its two-dimensional size on the page. Experienced painters and photographers are less susceptible to this illusion, because the two-dimensional size is more accessible to their perception.
against their own death in a terrorist attack while on a trip to Europe, while another group were offered insurance that would cover death of any kind on the trip. Even though "death of any kind" includes "death in a terrorist attack," the former group were willing to pay more than the latter. Kahneman suggests that the attribute of fear
is being substituted for a calculation of the total risks of travel. Fear of terrorism for these subjects was stronger than a general fear of dying on a foreign trip.
of whites, blacks and Asians, that racial attribute might substitute for the more intangible attribute of intelligence. The pre-conscious, intuitive nature of attribute substitution explains how subjects can be influenced by the stereotype while thinking that they have made an honest, unbiased evaluation of the other person's intelligence.
has argued that attribute substitution is pervasive when people reason about moral
, political or legal matters. Given a difficult, novel problem in these areas, people search for a more familiar, related problem (a "prototypical case") and apply its solution as the solution to the harder problem. According to Sunstein, the opinions of trusted political or religious authorities can serve as heuristic attributes when people are asked their own opinions on a matter. Another source of heuristic attributes is emotion
: people's moral opinions on sensitive subjects like sexuality
and human cloning
may be driven by reactions such as disgust
, rather than by reasoned principles. Sunstein has been challenged as not providing enough evidence that attribute substitution, rather than other processes, is at work in these cases.
in the familiarity data is accounted for by the attractiveness of the photograph.
, then they should resemble the base rates, i.e. the proportion of students in each of the nine areas (which had been separately estimated by a third group). A probabilistic judgment would say that Tom is more likely to be a Humanities student than Library Science, because many more students study Humanities, and the additional information in the profile is vague and unreliable. Instead, the ratings of likelihood matched the ratings of similarity almost perfectly, both in this study and a similar one where subjects judged the likelihood of a fictional woman taking different careers. This suggests that rather than estimating probability using base rates, subjects had substituted the more accessible attribute of similarity.
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...
es and perceptual illusions
Optical illusion
An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from objective reality. The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a perception that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source...
. It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic
Heuristic
Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...
attribute. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system. Hence, when someone tries to answer a difficult question, they may actually answer a related but different question, without realizing that a substitution has taken place. This explains why individuals can be unaware of their own biases, and why biases persist even when the subject is made aware of them. It also explains why human judgments often fail to show regression toward the mean
Regression toward the mean
In statistics, regression toward the mean is the phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on a second measurement, and—a fact that may superficially seem paradoxical—if it is extreme on a second measurement, will tend...
.
The theory of attribute substitution unifies a number of separate explanations of reasoning errors in terms of cognitive heuristics. In turn, the theory is subsumed by an effort-reduction framework proposed by Anuj K. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, which states that people use a variety of techniques to reduce the effort of making decisions.
Background
Amos Tversky
Amos Nathan Tversky, was a cognitive and mathematical psychologist, a pioneer of cognitive science, a longtime collaborator of Daniel Kahneman, and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement...
and Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology....
had argued that a broad family of biases (systematic errors in judgment and decision) were explainable in terms of a few heuristics (information-processing shortcuts), including availability
Availability heuristic
The availability heuristic is a phenomenon in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind....
and representativeness
Representativeness heuristic
The representativeness heuristic is a psychological term describing a phenomenon wherein people judge the probability or frequency of a hypothesis by considering how much the hypothesis resembles available data as opposed to using a Bayesian calculation. While often very useful in everyday life, it...
. In a 2002 revision of the theory, Kahneman and Shane Frederick
Shane Frederick
Shane Frederick is an associate professor at Yale University's School of Management. He earlier worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the creator of the "Cognitive Reflection Test", or CRT, a form of intelligence test that tests how "rational" testees are...
proposed attribute substitution as a process underlying these and other effects.
In 1975, psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens
Stanley Smith Stevens
Stanley Smith Stevens was an American psychologist who founded Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory and is credited with the introduction of Stevens' power law. Stevens authored a milestone textbook, the 1400+ page "Handbook of Experimental Psychology" . He was also one of the founding organizers...
proposed that the strength of a stimulus (e.g. the brightness of a light, the severity of a crime) is encoded neurally in a way that is independent of modality
Stimulus modality
Stimulus modality also sensory modality is one aspect of a stimulus or what we percieve after a stimulus. For example the temperature modality is registered after heat or cold stimulate a receptor. There are many modalities: temperature, taste, pressure...
. Kahneman and Frederick built on this idea, arguing that the target attribute and heuristic attribute could be very different in nature.
Conditions
Kahneman and Frederick propose three conditions for attribute substitution:- The target attribute is relatively inaccessible.
Substitution is not expected to take place in answering factual questions that can be retrieved directly from memory ("What is your birthday?") or about current experience ("Do you feel thirsty now?). - An associated attribute is highly accessible.
This might be because it is evaluated automatically in normal perception or because it has been primedPriming (psychology)Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. It can occur following perceptual, semantic, or conceptual stimulus repetition...
. For example, someone who has been thinking about their love life and is then asked how happy they are might substitute how happy they are with their love life rather than other areas. - The substitution is not detected and corrected by the reflective system.
For example, when asked "A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" many subjects incorrectly answer $0.10. An explanation in terms of attribute substitution is that, rather than work out the sum, subjects parse the sum of $1.10 into a large amount and a small amount, which is easy to do. Whether they feel that is the right answer will depend on whether they check the calculation with their reflective system.
Examples
In optical illusions
Attribute substitution would also explain the persistence of some illusions. For example, when subjects judge the size of two figures in a perspectivePerspective (graphical)
Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...
picture, their apparent sizes can be distorted by the 3D context, making a convincing optical illusion. The theory states that the three-dimensional size of the figure (which is accessible because it is automatically computed by the visual system) is substituted for its two-dimensional size on the page. Experienced painters and photographers are less susceptible to this illusion, because the two-dimensional size is more accessible to their perception.
Valuing insurance
Kahneman gives an example where some Americans were offered insuranceInsurance
In law and economics, insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for payment. An insurer is a company selling the...
against their own death in a terrorist attack while on a trip to Europe, while another group were offered insurance that would cover death of any kind on the trip. Even though "death of any kind" includes "death in a terrorist attack," the former group were willing to pay more than the latter. Kahneman suggests that the attribute of fear
Fear
Fear is a distressing negative sensation induced by a perceived threat. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of danger...
is being substituted for a calculation of the total risks of travel. Fear of terrorism for these subjects was stronger than a general fear of dying on a foreign trip.
Stereotypes
Stereotypes can be a source of heuristic attributes. In a face-to-face conversation with a stranger, judging their intelligence is more computationally complex than judging the colour of their skin. So if the subject has a stereotype about the relative intelligenceIntelligence
Intelligence has been defined in different ways, including the abilities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence and problem solving....
of whites, blacks and Asians, that racial attribute might substitute for the more intangible attribute of intelligence. The pre-conscious, intuitive nature of attribute substitution explains how subjects can be influenced by the stereotype while thinking that they have made an honest, unbiased evaluation of the other person's intelligence.
In judgments of morality and fairness
Legal scholar Cass SunsteinCass Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who currently is the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration...
has argued that attribute substitution is pervasive when people reason about moral
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
, political or legal matters. Given a difficult, novel problem in these areas, people search for a more familiar, related problem (a "prototypical case") and apply its solution as the solution to the harder problem. According to Sunstein, the opinions of trusted political or religious authorities can serve as heuristic attributes when people are asked their own opinions on a matter. Another source of heuristic attributes is emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
: people's moral opinions on sensitive subjects like sexuality
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
and human cloning
Human cloning
Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. It does not usually refer to monozygotic multiple births nor the reproduction of human cells or tissue. The ethics of cloning is an extremely controversial issue...
may be driven by reactions such as disgust
Disgust
Disgust is a type of aversion that involves withdrawing from a person or object with strong expressions of revulsion whether real or pretended. It is one of the basic emotions and is typically associated with things that are regarded as unclean, inedible, infectious, gory or otherwise offensive...
, rather than by reasoned principles. Sunstein has been challenged as not providing enough evidence that attribute substitution, rather than other processes, is at work in these cases.
The Beautiful-is-Familiar effect
Psychologist Benoît Monin reports a series of experiments in which subjects, looking at photographs of faces, have to judge whether they have seen those faces before. It is repeatedly found that attractive faces are more likely to be mistakenly labeled as familiar. Monin interprets this result in terms of attribute substitution. The heuristic attribute in this case is a "warm glow"; a positive feeling towards someone that might either be due to their being familiar or being attractive. This interpretation has been criticised, because not all the varianceVariance
In probability theory and statistics, the variance is a measure of how far a set of numbers is spread out. It is one of several descriptors of a probability distribution, describing how far the numbers lie from the mean . In particular, the variance is one of the moments of a distribution...
in the familiarity data is accounted for by the attractiveness of the photograph.
Evidence
The most direct evidence, according to Kahneman, is a 1973 experiment which used a psychological profile of Tom W., a fictional graduate student. One group of subjects had to rate Tom's similarity to a typical student in each of nine academic areas (Law, Engineering, Library Science etc.). Another group had to rate how likely it is that Tom specialised in each area. If these ratings of likelihood are governed by probabilityProbability
Probability is ordinarily used to describe an attitude of mind towards some proposition of whose truth we arenot certain. The proposition of interest is usually of the form "Will a specific event occur?" The attitude of mind is of the form "How certain are we that the event will occur?" The...
, then they should resemble the base rates, i.e. the proportion of students in each of the nine areas (which had been separately estimated by a third group). A probabilistic judgment would say that Tom is more likely to be a Humanities student than Library Science, because many more students study Humanities, and the additional information in the profile is vague and unreliable. Instead, the ratings of likelihood matched the ratings of similarity almost perfectly, both in this study and a similar one where subjects judged the likelihood of a fictional woman taking different careers. This suggests that rather than estimating probability using base rates, subjects had substituted the more accessible attribute of similarity.
See also
- Inattentional blindnessInattentional blindnessInattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is when a person fails to notice some stimulus that is in plain sight. This stimulus is usually unexpected but fully visible. This typically happens because humans are overloaded with inputs. It is impossible to pay attention to every...
- Labeling theoryLabeling theoryLabeling theory is closely related to interactionist and social construction theories. Labeling theory was developed by sociologists during the 1960's. Howard Saul Becker's book entitled Outsiders was extremely influential in the development of this theory and its rise to popularity...
- List of cognitive biases
- Neglect of probabilityNeglect of probabilityThe neglect of probability bias, a type of cognitive bias, is the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty and is one simple way in which people regularly violate the normative rules for decision making....
- Self-deceptionSelf-deceptionSelf-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument...