Koehler, J. J.  & Macchi, L. (in press). Thinking About Low Probability Events: An Exemplar Cueing Theory.  Psychological Science.

ABSTRACT

The way people respond to the chance that an unlikely event will occur depends on how the event is described. We propose that people attach more weight to unlikely events when they can easily generate or imagine examples in which the event has occurred or will occur. We tested this idea in two experiments with mock jurors using written murder scenarios. The results suggested that jurors attach more weight to the defendant’s claim that an incriminating DNA match is merely coincidental when it is easy for the jurors to imagine others whose DNA would also match. We manipulated the difficulty of imagining such examples by varying the description of the DNA match statistic. Some of the variations that influenced the jurors were normatively irrelevant.

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