Naive Attributors' Attributions and Predictions: What Is Informative and When Is an Effect an Effect?

Borgida has questioned the extent to which Wells and Harvey's data indicate that people do not ignore consensus information when making predictions and attributions. This article takes issue with Borgida's summary of parts of our work and with several of his arguments on grounds of precision and completeness. It is also noted that Kahneman and Tversky's analyses of data in their lawyer-engineer study were generally underrepresentative of their subjects' behavior. A replication of Kahneman and Tversky's lawyer-engineer study, using all subjects' data, indicated that subjects did not ignore base-rate information for any of the three target cases described by Kahneman and Tversky. It is concluded that Wells and Harvey's assertion that people do not ignore (though they may not use optimally) consensus information in predictions and attributions is consistent with the attribution and psychology-of-prediction literatures.