The representativeness heuristic suggests that similarity judgments provide a basis for judgments of likelihood. We use Tversky’s (1977) contrast model of similarity to design tests of this underlying mechanism. If similarity is used to judge likelihood, factors that are known to affect similarity should also affect judgments of likelihood. In two experiments, we manipulated two such factors described in the contrast model of similarity: the nature of the task and context effects. In a between-subject design, respondents assessed either similarity of fictive citizens of 15th century Florence, or the likelihood that they belonged to the same family. The factors that affected similarity also affected the likelihood judgments. These results support the assumption that similarity is an important contributor to judgments of likelihood.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between openness to diversity in terms of linguist, visible, value and informational heterogeneity and group processes depicted by group trust and group conflict. We collected data using a web-based survey among 498 academics in multicultural departments. The departments were located in four different Danish universities. We found openness to value diversity and informational diversity to have a positive association with group trust and a negative association with group conflict. Openness to linguistic diversity had positive relationships with group trust. The findings of this study suggest that openness to diversity should be highly prioritized by human resource managers in demographically diverse organizations. Possible interventions include organizational culture change programs, diversity training at individual and team levels as well as rewarding group oriented behavior.

Observers viewed two side-by-side arrays each of which contained three yellow Munsell papers, three blue, and one neutral Munsell. Each array was illuminated uniformly and independently of the other. The neutral light source intensities were 1380, 125, or 20 lux. All six possible combinations of light intensities were set as illumination conditions. On each trial, observers were asked to rate the dissimilarity between each chip in one array and each chip in the other by using a 30-point scale. Each pair of surfaces in each illumination condition was judged five times. We analyzed this data using non-metric multi-dimensional scaling to determine how light intensity and surface chroma contributed to dissimilarity and how they interacted. Dissimilarities were captured by a three-dimensional configuration in which one dimension corresponded to differences in light intensity.

Our concern here, is the characterization of dissimilarity indexes defined over finite sets, whose spatial representation is spherical. Consequently, we propose a methodology (NormedMultiDimensional Scaling) to determine the spherical euclidean representation of a set ofitems best accounting for the initial dissimilarity between items. Thismethodology has the advantage of being graphically readable on individual qualitiesof projection like the normed PCA, of which it constitutes a generalization. Moreover, it avoids the arbitrary character of spherical encoding which the use of similitude functions currently used in MDS, implies.