Penka Hristova

Does Irrelevant Information Influence Judgment? Penka Hristova

The present book reports a piece of research, which focuses on the mechanisms that may shift systematically human judgment on a scale with respect to irrelevant contextual information. Although this book is about judgment, it actually assumes that the main underlying mechanism of judgment is an analogical mapping between a given scale and a set of stimuli, elicited in the working memory (i.e. the target stimulus, recently judged stimuli and typical for the judged category stimuli). Thus, on one hand, it shows how analogy-making can be plausibly applied for understanding seemingly different processes, on another it shows how context may change the final judgment.