Yes / There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the “stakes” or importance of
being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date,
judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary
paradigms: responses to “low” stakes cases are compared with responses to “high stakes”
cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary properties—they are scalar: whether a
situation is “high” or “low” stakes is a matter of degree. So far, no experimental work has
investigated the scalar nature of stakes effects on knowledge: do stakes effects increase as
the stakes get higher? Do stakes effects only appear once a certain threshold of stakes has
been crossed? Does the effect plateau at a certain point? To address these questions, we
conducted experiments that probe for the scalarity of stakes effects using several
experimental approaches. We found evidence of scalar stakes effects using an “evidenceseeking” experimental design, but no evidence of scalar effects using a traditional
“evidence-fixed” experimental design. In addition, using the evidence-seeking design, we
uncovered a large, but previously unnoticed framing effect on whether participants are
skeptical about whether someone can know something, no matter how much evidence they
have. The rate of skeptical responses and the rate at which participants were willing to
attribute “lazy knowledge”—that someone can know something without having to check—
were themselves subject to a stakes effect: participants were more skeptical when the
stakes were higher, and more prone to attribute lazy knowledge when the stakes were
lower. We argue that the novel skeptical stakes effect provides resources to respond to
criticisms of the evidence-seeking approach that argue that it does not target knowledge / Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-2016-193)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/17040 |
| Date | 02 April 2019 |
| Creators | Francis, Kathryn B., Beaman, P., Hansen, N. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Accepted manuscript |
| Rights | (c) 2019 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) |
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