ELIMINATION AND INCLUSION PROCEDURES IN JUDGMENT

Consider two judgment procedures for selecting an answer from a set of multiple alternatives. One could answer a question either by includin g likely alternatives from the initial set of alternatives or by elimi nating the least likely alternatives from that same initial set. An in teresting question is whether the two judgment processes are equivalen t and yield the same final selection. The results from two studies ind icate that individuals generate significantly larger sets of candidate s in an elimination process than in an inclusion process, with concurr ent increase in accuracy. We show that this finding is a logical conse quence of the non-complementarity of elimination and inclusion, and su ggest a screening model with two criteria to explain the results. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.