Effects of ignorance and information on judgments and decisions

We compared Turkish and English students’ soccer forecasting for English soccer matches. Although the Turkish students knew very little about English soccer, they selected teams on the basis of familiarity with the team (or its identified city); their prediction success was surprisingly similar to knowledgeable English students—consistent with Goldstein and Gigerenzer’s (1999; 2002) characterization of the recognition heuristic. The Turkish students made forecasts for some of the matches with additional information—the half-time scores. In this and a further study, where British students predicting matches for foreign teams could choose whether or not to use half-time information, we found that predictions that could be made by recognition alone were influenced by the half-time information. We consider the implications of these findings in the context of Goldstein and Gigerenzer’s (2002, p. 82) suggestion that “… no other information can reverse the choice determined by recognition” and a recent more qualified statement (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 2011) indicating that two processes, recognition and evaluation guide the adaptive selection of the recognition heuristic.