Reliance on accessibility experiences in judgment and decision making

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The long-standing belief that judgment and decision-making rely solely on content information has been challenged by recent research in Social Psychology. It is now widely accepted that judgments are influenced not only by content but also by experiential information, including affective experiences (e.g., mood states) and cognitive experiences (e.g., ease or difficulty of recalling information). This research explores when individuals are likely to depend on cognitive subjective experiences during judgment and decision-making, specifically focusing on the conditions that encourage reliance on accessibility experiences. A comprehensive theoretical model is proposed to explain how these cognitive subjective experiences are formed and integrated into judgment processes. Five experiments are conducted to support this model, revealing that reliance on cognitive subjective experiences is more likely in situations characterized by low processing motivation and/or low processing capacity—conditions that are common in everyday life. Thus, the tendency to rely on cognitive subjective experiences may be more prevalent than previously thought, suggesting that this approach is not merely an alternative but potentially the more frequent and valid mechanism for judgment.