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A fundamental piece of information we use to make decisions, understand past events, and predict future events in our lives, is 'frequency'. We make judgements, assess risk and make consumer decisions, on the basis of the frequency of events we have experienced or observed. Given the ability to affect both our beliefs and behaviour, this is a topic that has long been in need of an integrative review.
This is the first book to focus on the topic of 'frequency processing'. With contributions from the leaders in the field of psychology, it is a book that will profoundly influence future research in this area.
Zusammenfassung
From childhood, each of us develops our own personal set of theories and beliefs about the world in which we live. Given the impossibility of knowing about every event that can ever take place, we use cognitive short cuts to try to predict and make sense of the world around us. One of the fundamental pieces of information we use to predict future events, and make sense of past events, is 'frequency' - how often has such an event happened to us, or how often have we observed a particular event? With such information we will make inferences about the likelihood of its future appearance. We will make judgements, assess risk, or even consumer decisions, on the basis of this information. We also form associations between events that frequently occur together, and even (often incorrectly) attribute causality between one event and the other as a result of their simultaneous appearance.
How is it though that we process such information? How does our brain deal with information on frequencies? How does such information influence our behaviour, beliefs, and judgements? Important new findings on this topic have come from research within both social and cognitive psychology, though until now, never brought together in a single volume.
This is the first book to bring together two disparate literatures on this topic - drawing on research from both cognitive psychology and social psychology. Including contributions from world leaders in the field, this is a timely, and long overdue volume on this topic.
Zusatztext
This excellent collection provides the reader with a comprehensive coverage of findings and theories about how people encode and summarize frequency information. While it is a smorgasbord of self-contained chapters with little cross-referencing (or elaboration of disagreements), the high quality of the vast majority of these chapters yields a cognitive feast. They are written by eminent researchers who have opted to present both recent results and summaries of their most important work - certainly not the feared secondary idea or paper submitted because it would be easier to publish in an edited volume than in critically peer reviewed journal.
