Through a narrow window: Sample size and the perception of correlation.

Abstract

A theoretical analysis (Y. Kareev, 1995b) of the sampling distribution of correlations led to the surprising conclusion that the use of small samples has a potential advantage for the early detection of a correlation. This is so because the distribution is highly skewed, and the smaller the sample size, the more the distribution is skewed. This article describes 2 experiments that were designed as empirical tests of this conclusion. In Experiment 1 (N = 112), the authors compared the predictions of participants differing in their working-memory capacity (hence in the size of the samples they were likely to consider). In Experiment 2 (N = 144), the authors compared the predictions of participants who viewed samples of different sizes, whose size was determined by the authors. The results fully supported Y. Kareev's conclusion : In both experiments, participants with lower capacity (or smaller samples) indeed perceived the correlation as more extreme and were more accurate in their predictions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 177 citations exist upstream.