BASES OF ACCEPTABILITY RATINGS IN QUASINATURALISTIC CONCEPT TASKS

The extent to which subjects used a probabilistic or a distance judgment process in rating the acceptability of concept exemplars was studied. After viewing 100 descriptions of airline uniforms chosen as fashionable by the public, subjects rated all possible uniforms for their public acceptability. The uniforms were described in terms of four three-valued qualitative (e.g., type of fabric) or quantitative (e.g., jacket length) attributes, with 20 subjects assigned to each description type. The results indicated that the majority of subjects in both groups used some form of probabilistic decision rule, with very few, if any, using a rule based on distance from a prototype. A data analysis technique which permitted examination of the behavior of individual subjects documented a significant amount of inter- and intrasubject variability in the number of aspects incorporated into the judgment process, in the number of different judgment rules utilized for different aspects, and in the types of decision rules used. It was concluded that subjects in earlier studies might well have been attending primarily to frequency differentials but that various methodological difficulties with the acquisition procedures and with the level of data analysis produced ambiguous and sometimes contradictory results. © 1978 Psychonomic Society, Inc.