Contextual Influences on Omission Neglect in the Fault Tree Paradigm

Fault trees are used to organize potential causes of a problem to facilitate better judgments about potential problem solutions. However, fault trees can lead to biased judgments because decision makers tend to overestimate the likelihood of problem causes that are explicitly mentioned in the fault tree and underestimate the likelihood of problem causes that are not. In this research, we examined the impact of context information and need for cognitive closure on these estimates. In 2 experiments, participants with a low need for cognitive closure used the informational content of experimenter provided and self-generated context information as a basis for making likelihood estimates. In contrast, participants with a high need for closure did not use experimenter provided context information at all but used the ease of producing self-generated context information (rather than informational content) as a basis for their likelihood estimates.