Recognizing National Hockey League greatness with an ignorance-based heuristic.

This study examined whether people adhered to the recognition heuristic (i.e., inferred that a recognized hockey player had more total career points than an unrecognized player) and whether using this heuristic could yield accurate decisions. On paired comparisons, having participants report whether they recognized each player plus any knowledge they had about each player permitted players to be classified as either unrecognized (UR), merely recognized (MR), or recognized with additional knowledge (RK), thus producing six possible trial types. Participants adhered to the recognition heuristic on 95% of MR-UR trials and were accurate on 81% of those trials. They chose the recognized player on 98% of RK-UR trials, yielding 94% accuracy. Women had less knowledge and recognized fewer players than men, yet they were nearly as accurate as men. Future research should examine the conditions under which the recognition heuristic is an adaptive strategy.