The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology

Previous studies have shown that individuals often choose one object between two objects using a simple heuristic (e.g., recognition, familiarity, or fluency heuristic) in a binary choice task. In the present study, we propose a new heuristic called familiarity-matching, which predicts that when a decision maker is familiar (or unfamiliar) with an object presented in a question sentence, s/he will choose the more (or less) familiar object from the two alternatives. We examined inference processes of familiarity-matching through a behavioral experiment. Results showed that participants indeed tended to employ familiarity-matching and that they often used familiarity-matching especially when solving difficult binary choice problems.