A prognostic utility bias in judgments of similarity between past and present instances: How available information is deemed useful for prediction

The motive for support and the identification of responsive partners

“…Vorauer and Ross suggest that a desire to obtain information about a topic makes motive-relevant constructs more accessible to the person. Similarly, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Warner and Bralow (1994) showed that, when people want to make a prediction, they “overestimate the relevance of available information to the judgment they are required to make” (p. 594). In brief, other researchers have also observed that ratings of informativeness may be elevated by motivational factors related to the task.…”

Stickier Priors: The Effects of Nonanalytic versus Analytic Thinking in New Product Forecasting

“…Consistent with the notion that asking for an initial estimate induces strong anchoring effects, subjects rated the analogy as more important in top-down processing than in bottom-up processing (F 1,81 =7.44, p=.01, ω 2 =.07). This result suggests that perceived need or usefulness influences judgments of importance of information (seeGreenberg, Pyszczynski, Warner, & Bralow 1994).11 It is difficult to distinguish analogy-induced biases from anchoring effects in this study because a numerical anchor was included with the analogy. Other studies reported in this paper, as well as the pilot study, have examined analogy effects without explicit anchors.…”