When the Setting Decides: How Context, Defaults and Authority Steer Judgment

Start with the plainest case, where the surroundings decide what you can remember. Godden and Baddeley's 1975 study of divers found that word lists learned underwater were recalled better underwater and lists learned on land were recalled better on land.

Here the setting is a comparison. The same object is judged more or less favorably depending on what was shown just before or beside it, an idea the entry traces to Helson's adaptation-level theory of 1964.

Repetition alone can move a preference. Robert Zajonc's studies of 1968 developed the account that people come to like a word, image or person more simply because it has been seen again and again, with no change in its actual qualities.

The pre-selected option wins far more often than it should. Johnson and Goldstein's 2003 study of organ donation compared opt-out and opt-in systems and showed how much the starting position alone changes participation.

Missing information is itself a push. Daniel Ellsberg's 1961 urn experiments showed people preferring a bet with known odds over one with unknown odds, in a way ordinary expected utility theory could not explain.

When a situation seems to call for something, doing nothing feels wrong. The entry cites a study of professional soccer goalkeepers by Bar-Eli, Azar and colleagues, published in 2007, in which goalkeepers dived to one side far more often than they stayed in the center.

The path now turns to other people. Authority bias is the tendency to give an authority figure's opinion more accuracy and weight regardless of its content, and the entry points to Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, which began in 1961, as the best known demonstration.

The authority can be a machine. Automation bias is the tendency to favor suggestions from automated decision systems and ignore contradictory information, and the entry notes that the term was coined by Mosier and Skitka in 1996 and that it has been documented in aviation and clinical medicine.

Suggestion can reach back into memory. Elizabeth Loftus's research, begun in the 1970s, showed that the wording of questions asked after an event could change what people later reported remembering, which is why the topic matters so much for eyewitness testimony.

End with a caution and a question. A 2011 study of Israeli parole board decisions reported more lenient rulings after a meal break, and the entry also records that later researchers contested the finding on methodological grounds, so it is as much a lesson about reading evidence as about judges.