The Effect of Relative Encoding on Memory-Based Judgments

Abstract

Several models of judgment propose that people struggle with absolute judgments and instead represent options on the basis of their relative standing. This leads to a conundrum when people make judgments from memory: They may encode an option's ordinal rank relative to the surrounding options but later observe a different distribution of options. Do people update their representations when making judgments from memory, or do they maintain their representations based on the initial encoding? In three studies, we found that people making memory-based judgments rely on a stimulus's relative standing in the distribution at the time of encoding rather than attending to absolute quality or updating the stimulus's ordinal ranking in light of the distribution at the time of the later judgment.

In the real world, people prefer their last whisky when tasting options in a long sequence

“…One of the reasons that serial position effects occur is that a sequence thwarts a person’s ability to make absolute judgments, and instead encourages relative judgments [ 13 ]. For instance, if asked to decide how much we like a particular song when it is presented to us alone, we will tend to make an absolute judgment, a process that results in highly variable assessments between judges, because we will create our own comparison standard for the song [ 13 ]. But when an obvious comparison standard is available, we tend to make relative judgments whenever we can, such as when we are provided with two or more songs.…”

“…But relative judgments can result in different evaluations of the same item if circumstances change. For example, people evaluate the same song better when it appears on a playlist of bad songs than great songs [ 13 ]. Why?…”

“…As we try the first one, it becomes not only the lead, but it is also now a standard against which to compare subsequent options to. As we work our way through the other two options, we make relative judgments, comparing each one to the first option initially, unless another option beats it out earlier in the sequence [ 13 ]. Interestingly, other research suggests that the first option does not need to be “outstanding” as a competitor.…”

“…Take, for instance, a very knowledgeable taster. This “expert” will decide on a favorite using the relative judgment process—pairing up each of the “challengers” in the sequence with the current favorite wine for comparison—and ultimately tend to prefer the first or last of the wines [ 2 , 13 ]. The main reason the expert adopts a strategy whereby each new “challenger” is compared to the current favorite is that experts are more excited by the products and motivated to evaluate them, so experts are more engaged and persistent when it comes to finding a competitor wine that is exceptional enough to demote the “champion” wine holding the lead [ 2 ].…”

“…Because the novice wine taster is not well versed in the subtle differences among fine wines, he or she spends less time and effort comparing the “champion” wine to the other wines. A novice is incapable of the fine-grained pairwise comparisons that experts undertake, so less knowledgeable tasters assess each option, one at a time, on its individual merits—and isolated process of evaluation, which is more similar to an absolute judgment than a relative judgment [ 13 , 20 ]. So, rather than using the strategy of assessing whether this wine is better than the current favorite, a novice will simply try each one and evaluate it in isolation.…”