Similarity between hypotheses and evidence

We explore two novel consequences of similarity-based likelihood judgment. In Section I, we distinguish between the evidence on which judgments are ba sed and the hypotheses that serve as the objects of judgment. The location of a feature, whether in the evidence or the hypotheses, influences the per ceived similarity between evidence and hypotheses and consequently yields j udgments that are inconsistent with the requirements of probability theory. In Section II, we examine judgment of disjunctive hypotheses. For certain types of disjunctions, the assessment of similarity produces consistent non monotonicities: the support of a disjunction is smaller than that of one of its components. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings in te rms of support theory and the principle of context independence. (C) 1999 A cademic Press.