Decision-making based on limited information is a common occurrence. Whether it is the possibility of a cheaper product elsewhere or the unknown qualifications of election candidates, people are regularly forced to make a decision under ignorance or uncertainty. In such situations, information about certain events is unavailable or too costly to acquire and people rely on subjective probability allocation to guide decision-making processes. This allocation seems to result in what is known as ignorance priors, i.e., decision-makers assigning equal probabilities to each possible outcome within a given set. How events are grouped or partitioned is often subjective and may influence probability judgments and subsequent decisions. In such cases, the way the choices within a choice set are presented may shape the perceived likelihood of different outcomes. Understanding the impact of partitioning on probability estimation is crucial for both psychological and economic theories of judgment and decision.

 

The question of evaluating probabilities under uncertainty has received much attention in the psychology and economics literature over the past decades given the wide range of possible applications. In the current work, Ding and Feldman (2024) seek to replicate one of the foundational works on the topic: Fox and Rottenstreich (2003). In the original work, the authors provided exploratory evidence indicating that the framing of a situation affects the way individuals perceive probabilities of possible outcomes. They showed that people assigned uniform probabilities to sets of events described in a problem, such that the way the events are described partly determines people’s partitioning of those events and evaluations of the probabilities of the possible outcomes. Additionally, this partitioned framing affected judgments both under conditions of ignorance (where individuals have no information and rely solely on uniform probability assignments) and uncertainty (where individuals have some information but still rely on heuristics influenced by partitioning). This suggests that priors resulting from the inference of available evidence are sometimes partly contaminated by partitioning bias, affecting both uninformed and partially informed decision-making processes. As a consequence, the partitioning of events into different subsets might lead to varying evaluations of a single situation, resulting in inconsistencies and poorly calibrated probability assessments.

 

Ding and Feldman (2024) aim to replicate Studies 1a, 1b, 3, and 4 from Fox and Rottenstreich (2003). Their close replication will rely on original data (US participants, Prolific, N=600, not collected yet) with a large statistical power (>95%). Their replication aims to examine whether the partitioned framing affects prior formation under ignorance (Studies 1a, 1b, and 4) and uncertainty (Study 3). In addition, the authors propose an extension examining estimations of alternative event(s) contrasting estimations of the probabilities of events happening versus of events not happening.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated by two external reviewers and the recommender. Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' and the recommender’s comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

 

Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.

 

 

 

 

1. Ding, K. & Feldman, G. (2024). Revisiting Partition Priming in judgment under uncertainty:
Replication and extension Registered Report of Fox and Rottenstreich (2003). In principle acceptance of Version 2 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/px6vb

 

2. Fox, C. R. & Rottenstreich, Y. (2003). Partition priming in judgment under uncertainty. Psychological Science, 14, 195-200. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.02431