People tend to give subadditive probability judgments when asked to assess each in a set of three or more exclusive hypotheses. The degree of subadditivity in such judgments is determined in large part by the evidence upon which the judgments are based, but the characteristics of the evidence that influence subadditivity have yet to be fully specified. In the present experiments, this issue was addressed using a classification learning task, in which the relationship between the evidence and the hypotheses under consideration can be controlled experimentally. Two potential evidential influences on subadditivity--cue conflict and cue frequency--are distinguished and tested in three experiments. The results indicate that (a) people's probability judgments are systematically subadditive--in violation of standard probability theory--even when the judgments are based on cues learned within the experimental context, contrary to the predictions of "ecological" theories of human judgment which attribute such biases to nonrepresentative item selection; and (b) cue conflict has a reliable influence on the degree of subadditivity exhibited in probability judgments.

The ability to monitor our cognitive performance (i.e., metacognitive monitoring) is central to efficient functioning.Research investigating this ability has focused largely on tasks that rely exclusively on internal processes. However, our day-to-day cognitive activities often consist of mixes of internal and external processes. For example, we can offload memory demandsonto external media (e.g., computers, paper). In the present investigation, we expand research on the metacognitive monitoringof performance to this domain. Specifically, we examine participant’s ability to accurately monitor their performance in tasksthat require them to rely on only their internal processes (e.g., short term memory to remember a series of letters) and tasks thatrequire them to rely on both (e.g., paper and pencil to remember a series of letters). Results suggest that the former results insuperior monitoring relative to the latter. Implications for understanding metacognition in more distributed cognitive domainswill be discussed.

The present work examined the extent to which evaluations of actions could be biased by the strategic use of euphemistic (agreeable) and dysphemistic (disagreeable) terms. Across multiple studies, we demonstrate that evaluations of actions are made more favorable by replacing a disagreeable term (e.g., torture) with a semantically related agreeable term (e.g., enhanced interrogation) in an act’s description. Notably, the influence of these terms was reduced (but not eliminated) when actions were described in a less ambiguous (i.e., more detailed) manner. Despite their influence, participants judged both agreeable and disagreeable action descriptions as largely truthful and distinct from lies, and judged agents using such descriptions as more trustworthy and moral than liars. Overall, the present findings suggest that a strategic speaker can, through the careful use of language, sway the opinions of others while avoiding many of the reputational costs associated with less subtle forms of linguistic manipulation (e.g., lying).