Which world should be represented in representative design? (2006)

Abstract

Brunswik opposed psychology’s default experimental method (Kurz& Tweney,1997).Hequestionedboththe feasibility of disentangling variables and the realism of the stimuli created in doing so. We begin with a short historical review of the notion of representative design, Brunswik’s term for an experimental design that aims for a veridical repre- sentation of the environment in which organisms naturally perform. Then we ask whether representative design matters for the results obtained. Lastly, we identify a key conceptual difficulty of representative design, namely, the issue ofhowto define the reference class fromwhich situations are sampled.We demonstrate how different reference classes may lead to different conclusions and discuss possible solutions for this problem

Bibliographic entry

Hoffrage, U., & Hertwig, R. (2006). Which world should be represented in representative design? In K. Fiedler & P. Juslin (Eds.), Information sampling and adaptive cognition (pp. 381-408). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miscellaneous

Publication year 2006
Document type: In book
Publication status: Published
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