| Summary: | People often assess
the reasonableness of another person’s judgments. When doing so, the evaluator
should set aside knowledge that would not have been available to the evaluatee
to assess whether the evaluatee made a reasonable decision, given the available
information. But under what circumstances does the evaluator set aside
information? On the one hand, if the evaluator fails to set aside prior
information, not available to the evaluatee, they exhibit belief bias. But on
the other hand, when Bayesian inference is called for, the evaluator should
generally incorporate prior knowledge about relevant probabilities in decision
making. The present research integrated these two perspectives in two
experiments. Participants were asked to take the perspective of a fictitious
evaluatee and to evaluate the reasonableness of the evaluatee's decision. The
participant was privy to information that the fictitious evaluatee did not
have. Specifically, the participant knew whether the evaluatee's decision
judgment was factually correct. Participants’ judgments were biased
(Experiments 1 and 2) by the factuality of the conclusion as they assessed the
evaluatee’s reasonableness. We also found that the format of information
presentation (Experiment 2) influenced the degree to which participants’
reasonableness ratings were responsive to the evaluatee's Bayesian rationality.
Specifically, responsivity was greater when the information was presented in an
icon-based, graphical, natural-frequency format than when presented in either a
numerical natural-frequency format or a probability format. We interpreted the
effects of format to suggest that graphical presentation can help organize
information into nested sets, which in turn enhances Bayesian rationality.
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