Elimination and Inclusion Procedures in Judgment

Consider two judgment procedures for selecting an answer from a set of multiple alternatives. One could answer a question either by including likely alternatives from the initial set of alternatives or by eliminating the least likely alternatives from that same initial set. An interesting question is whether the two judgment processes are equivalent and yield the same final selection. The results from two studies indicate that individuals generate significantly larger sets of candidates in an elimination process than in an inclusion process, with concurrent increase in accuracy. We show that this finding is a logical consequence of the non-complementarity of elimination and inclusion, and suggest a screening model with two criteria to explain the results.