DEMONSTRATING THE EFFECT OF CONTEXT ON ORDER EFFECTS FOR AN ARMY AIR DEFENSE TASK USING THE PATRIOT SIMULATOR

The results reported herein support the hypotheses that (1) situation- specific, contextual features of a task can cause people to use explan ation-based reasoning (Pennington and Hastie, 1993); (2) such reasonin g can cause experienced personnel, both individually and in two-person teams, to reinterpret the meaning of the same information when it is presented in two different ordered sequences; and (3) the result will be primacy or recency (or no) effects depending on whether the most re cent conflicting information can be explained away or not, respectivel y. These results extend the belief-adjustment model proposed by Hogart h and Einhorn (1992), which does not address information reinterpretat ions, and always predicts recency effects for an evaluation task with a short series of conflicting information. More generally, the results demonstrate the importance of situation-specific, contextual features in understanding judgment processes. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.