Does memory mediate susceptibility to cognitive biases? Implications of the decision-by-sampling theory

Abstract

Stewart, Chater and Brown’s (2006) decision-by-sampling theory proposes that people make decisions about everyday events by drawing samples of “similar” events from memory and comparing them to the event in question. Classic gainsversus- losses framing effects emerge naturally from the theory, along with a number of other decision-making phenomena. In this paper, we note that since these biases are treated as memory-related, and there are empirically observed individual differences in both memory and susceptibility to bias, the two might be expected to be related. Specifically, better memory should reduce overconfidence but, somewhat counterintuitively, strengthen framing effects. To test this, we measured working and retrieval memory for 60 undergraduates, and compared these to their susceptibility to each bias. Although the data collected displayed the usual decision-making effects, no relationship was found between memory and either bias once covariates were controlled for.