Predicting accuracy of judgment of contingency

Abstract

The article examines how people respond when a monetary incentive is provided for accuracy of judgement of contingency. People are of the inaccurate in judging response-outcome contingencies. Researchers indicated that people were usually biased in the direction of their initial expectations, particularly in the absence of congruent and unambiguous current information. A.T. Beck argued that people's affective state, especially severe depression, also influenced their judgment and that depressives tended to underestimate the contingencies between their responses and environmental outcomes. However, past research has not examined how people respond when a monetary incentive is provided for accuracy of judgment of contingency. The present study investigated whether previous expectations, situational information, and individual's affective state remain salient predicting factors when a monetary incentive is provided. Accuracy of judgment of contingencies was calculated as the difference between a subject's judgment of control and actual control for the tasks.