The dilution effect: judgmental bias, conversational convention, or a bit of both?

By Philip Tetlock, J. Lerner, R. Boettger. 1996

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Citations in the corpus

Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of changing stakes (2008, background): “The high-stakes dilution effect increases when the conversational norm is explicitly primed (subjects are told that ‘all information has been carefully selected’) and vanishes when the norm is explicitly cancelled (‘some information provided may be irrelevant’) [Tetlock, Lerner, and Boettger 1996 .”
Agenda 2000 — Social judgment and attitudes: warmer, more social, and less conscious (2000, background): “To the contrary, it increases their e orts to ®nd meaning in the material presented to them (e.g. Tetlock & Boettger, 1996).”
Coping with Accountability Cross-Pressures: Low-Effort Evasive Tactics and High-Effort Quests for Complex Compromises (2000, background): “The first possibility is that people shift into a relatively mindless form of integrative complexity, as illustrated by the dilution effect (Tetlock & Boettger, 1989; Tetlock, Lerner, & Boettger, 1996 ).”
Accounting for the effects of accountability. (1999, background): “Tetlock, Lerner, and Boettger (1996) tested this hypothesis on the dilution effect.”
Consumers' Beliefs about Product Benefits: The Effect of Obviously Irrelevant Product Information (2002, methodology): “Conversational Norms An alternative account from the social judgment literature argues that dilution is an experimental artifact resulting from subjects’ mistaken reliance on conversational norms (Schwarz et al. 1991; Slugoski and Wilson 1998; Tetlock, Lerner, and Boettger 1996).”