In one word: Not from experience

doi:10.1016/0001-6918(80)90034-7

Acta Psychologica

Volume 45, Issues 1–3, August 1980, Pages 223-241

https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(80)90034-7 Get rights and content

Abstract

Studies on clinical inference show that people do not always improve their judgments with experience. This paper argues that the expectation that they will improve is mistaken and founded on an incorrect conception of the nature of experience. Changing this conception towards a more adequate one along the lines suggested by Popper (1963) leads to a far more pessimistic view about people's ability to learn from experience, a view that is in closer corrrespondence with the facts from studies on clinical judgement. The paper also reviews results from psychological studies concerned with people's ability to learn from experience in probabilistic situations. These studies show that people have a number of biases which prevent them from using the information which experience provides. Examples of such biases are the tendency to use confirmatory evidence, assumptions about causality, and disregard of negative information. The paper argues that these biases can be understood in terms of the kind of information that people actually have to use when learning from experience outside the laboratory.

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^☆: Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

^∗: Author's address: Berndt Brehmer, Department of Psychology, University of Uppsala, P.O. Box 227, S-75104 Uppsala, Sweden.

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In one word: Not from experience☆

Abstract

Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

Acta Psychologica

Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

The psychology of thinking

Human conceptual behavior

Learning complex rules in probabilistic inference tasks

Scandinavian Journal of Psychology

Note on clinical judgement and the formal characteristics of clinical tasks

Psychological Bulletin

Effect of the postfeedback interval on learning of complex rules in probabilistic inference tasks

Scandinavian Journal of Psychology

Content and consistency in probabilistic inference tasks

Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

A study of thinking

Linear models in decision making

Psychological Bulletin

Learning from experience and suboptimal rules in decision making

Confidence in judgment: persistence of the illusion of validity

Psychological Review