Current Directions in Psychological Science · 2004 · 632 citations · 12 references
Behavioral Decision MakingSafety ProblemsSafety ScienceCognitionIndividual Decision MakingRisk AnalysisUncertain ReasoningFuzzy Risk AnalysisPsychologySocial SciencesSituational ReasoningRisk-taking BehaviorRisk ManagementManagementFuzzy Intuitive ProcessingDecision TheoryPublic PolicyBehavioral SciencesFuzzy LogicCognitive ScienceReasoning About ActionHuman CognitionExperimental PsychologyRisk GovernanceBehavioral EconomicsFuzzy-trace TheoryRisk Analysis (Business)Decision ScienceRisk Decisions
Risk reasoning underlies many health and safety problems, and fuzzy‑trace theory posits that intuition based on gist representations dominates over precise computation, providing a framework for understanding rationality and error severity. The paper introduces a new risk‑reasoning approach grounded in fuzzy‑trace theory. The model encodes verbatim and gist traces, relies on gist when possible, uses retrieval cues to access stored values, and explains how interference leads to denominator neglect while ensuring consistency across problems sharing the same gist. The principles account for classic patterns such as overestimating small risks while ignoring very small ones.
Many health and safety problems, including war and terrorism, are by-products of how people reason about risk. I describe a new approach to reasoning about risk that implements a modern dual-process model of memory called fuzzy-trace theory. This approach posits encoding of both verbatim and gist representations, with reliance on the latter whenever possible; dependence of reasoning on retrieval cues that access stored values and principles; and vulnerability of reasoning to processing interference from overlapping classes of events, which causes denominator neglect in risk or probability judgments. These simple principles explain classic and new findings, for example, the finding that people overestimate small risks but ignore very small risks. Fuzzy-trace theory differs from other dual-process approaches to reasoning in that it places intuition at the apex of development, considering fuzzy intuitive processing more advanced than precise computational processing (e.g., trading off risks and rewards). The theory supplies a conception of rationality that distinguishes degrees of severity of errors in reasoning. It also includes a mechanism for achieving consistency in reasoning, a hallmark of rationality, by explaining how a person can treat superficially different reasoning problems in the same way if the problems share an underlying gist.
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