I think this is highly confounded with effort. Asking people to decompose a forecast will, on average, cause them to think more. This further calls into question any positive findings for decomposition.
I find this baffling. It seems like breaking predictions into sub-parts should help. But I haven’t thought about it much :)
One possible counter-factor is in structuring people’s judgments artificially. If asking them to break a prediction into sub-parts makes them factor the problem in different ways than they would in their own thinking, I can see how that would hurt judgments.
And it could actually cost time. Asking sub-questions could cause people to spend their cognitive time on the particulars of those sub-problems, rather than spending that time on sub-problems they thought of themselves, and that work naturally with their overall strategy for making that prediction.
I think this is highly confounded with effort. Asking people to decompose a forecast will, on average, cause them to think more. This further calls into question any positive findings for decomposition.
I find this baffling. It seems like breaking predictions into sub-parts should help. But I haven’t thought about it much :)
One possible counter-factor is in structuring people’s judgments artificially. If asking them to break a prediction into sub-parts makes them factor the problem in different ways than they would in their own thinking, I can see how that would hurt judgments.
And it could actually cost time. Asking sub-questions could cause people to spend their cognitive time on the particulars of those sub-problems, rather than spending that time on sub-problems they thought of themselves, and that work naturally with their overall strategy for making that prediction.