Consideration of Alternative Hypotheses in Judgments Under Uncertainty Consider a situation where a patient has illness A or she has illness B f there are two mutually exclusive and exhaustive hypotheses. Given some evidence for illness A (e.g., a test result) a physician might then consider, or be asked, how confident knowing this result makes him or her that illness A is the problem. One way to think about how to respond to this question is to compare how the evidence reflects on illness A in comparison with illness B. An alternative is to consider how the evidence reflects on A versus against A (ignoring B or considering only how the evidence reflects on B versus not B). How competing alternative hypotheses are represented mentally (as dependent or independent) will clearly influence evaluations of confidence. This CAREER proposal, involves conducting a number of experiments to: Further refine and substantiate the idea that the way hypothesis testing is framed influences evaluated confidence Extend the application of this theory of hypothesis testing to explain other apparent anomalies in judgment Extend the model of hypothesis testing to more than two alternatives.
