This post starts from the conclusion of the previous post that the evidence supports a single strategy framework, looks at Julian Marewski’s criticism, and then piles on with ideas on how weights can be changed in a single strategy framework.
Marewski provided a paper for the special issue of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (2015) on “Modeling and Aiding Intuition in Organizational Decision Making”: “Unveiling the Lady in Black: Modeling and Aiding Intuition,” authored by Ulrich Hoffrage and Julian N. Marewski. The paper gives the parallel constraint satisfaction model a not so subtle knock:
By exaggerating and simplifying features or traits, caricatures can aid perceiving the real thing. In reality, both magic costumes and chastity belts are degrees on a continuum. In fact, many theories are neither solely formal or verbal. Glöckner and Betsch’s connectionist model of intuitive decision making, for instance, explicitly rests on both math and verbal assumptions. Indeed, on its own, theorizing at formal or informal levels is neither “good” nor “bad”. Clearly, both levels of description have their own merits and, actually, also their own problems. Both can be interesting, informative, and insightful – like the work presented in the first three papers of this special issue, which we hope you enjoy as much as we do. And both can border re-description and tautology. This can happen when a theory does not attempt to model processes. Examples are mathematical equations with free parameters that carry no explanatory value, but that are given quasi-psychological, marketable labels (e.g., “risk aversion”).