Extended Research on Dominance Violations in Similarity Judgments: The equate-to-differentiate interpretation

Extended Research on Dominance Violations in Similarity Judgments: The equate-to-differentiate interpretation

The dominance principle is so compelling both theoretically and practically that any rational choice rule would always select the dominant alternative. Taking into account the limited computational capacity of a human decision-maker, the "equate-to-differentiate" approach (Li, 1994a) is proposed to make the dominance rule applicable in more general cases. The present study on similarity judgment limits the information process to an integrating task simply involving qualitative analysis. The results show that the more intuitive or compelling integration task selected to test dominance does not lessen the violation of this basic rule of normative decision making. Such a finding, together with those obtained in the domain of preferential choice, adds to evidence pointing to fundamental limitations in people's capacity to process information.