Analogy and similarity are often assumed to be distinct psychological processes. In contrast to this position, the authors suggest that both similarity and analogy involve a process of structural alignment and mapping, that is, that similarity is like analogy. In this article, the authors first describe the structure-mapping process as it has been worked out for analogy. Then, this view is extended to similarity, where it is used to generate new predictions. Finally, the authors explore broader implications of structural alignment for psychological processing.

y be factored into the decision more heavily than is price. The execu- tive may choose to ride dow-ntown by taxi and then implement this decision by standing on line and taking a taxi to the hotel. To bring these sorts of decision situations into the laboratory, researchers commonly focused on the goal of obtaining money, which they assume is shared across people. In the prototypical task, subjects are given choice options that differ in probability and amount. The use of gambles enabled researchers to explore decision making under risk. Often, a number of different choices are made in a single experimental session, and the pattern of choices across sets is analyzed. For ample, people might be asked whether they prefer a 45% chance to win $200 or a 50% chance to win $150. Later in the same ses sion, they might be asked whether they prefer a 90% chance to win $200 or a 100% chance to win $150. At issue in studies like these is the consistency of people's choices. The anal- yses would in

The area of behavioral decision research, specifically the work on heuristics and biases, has had a tremendous influence on basic research, applied research, and application over the last twenty-five years. Its unique juxtaposition against economics has provided important benefits, but at the cost of leaving it disconnected from too much of psychology. This paper explores an expanded definition of behavioral decision research through the consideration of multiple levels of cognitive processing. Rather than being limited to how decision-makers depart from optimality, we offer a broader analysis of how decision-makers define the decision problem and link decisions to goals, as well as a more detailed focus on processes associated with implementing decisions. Over the past few decades the area of cognitive psychology has grown dramatically, social and developmental psychology have moved strongly in a cognitive direction, and behavioral decision research (BDR) has emerged as a new area of psychology. BDR is unique among psychological subfields in the impact that it has had on research outside of psychology - including its impact on economics, finance, public policy, law, medicine, marketing, organizational behavior, and negotiation. Unfortunately, BDR has also moved further away from many core areas of psychology, limiting its theoretical development and its integration with advances made in allied areas. Our central thesis is that the most well known part of BDR, the heuristics and biases approach, has been overly constrained by a focus on how people make mistakes at the point of decision. Research on heuristics and biases has implicitly assumed that the goal is known and that the details of implementing decisions are not part of the problem. The prescriptive goal is optim...

Analogy and similarity are often assumed to be distinct psychological processes. In contrast to this position, the authors suggest that both similarity and analogy involve a process of structural alignment and mapping, that is, that similarity is like analogy. In this article, the authors first describe the structure-mapping process as it has been worked out for analogy. Then, this view is extended to similarity, where it is used to generate new predictions. Finally, the authors explore broader implications of structural alignment for psychological processing. Analogy and similarity are central in cognitive processing. They are often viewed as quite separate: Analogy is a clever, sophisticated process used in creative discovery, whereas similarity is a brute perceptual process that we share with the entire animal kingdom. This view of similarity has important implications for the way we model human thinking, because similarity is demonstrably important across many areas of cognition. We store experiences in categories largely on the basis of their similarity to a category representation or to stored exemplars (Smith & Medin, 1981). In transfer, new problems are solved using procedures taken

this paper were circulated to other researchers to elicit additional studies. The findings are provided below in three sections: making forecasts, estimating uncertainty, and gaining acceptance. Making the Forecasts

this paper we summarize the results of 74 studies comparing behavior of experimental subjects who were paid zero, low or high financial performance-based incentives. The studies show that the effects of incentives are mixed and complicated. The extreme positions, that incentives make no difference at all, or always eliminate persistent irrationalities, are false. Organizing debate around those positions or using them to make editorial judgments is harmful and should stop. The presence and amount of financial incentive does seem to affect average performance in many tasks, particularly judgment tasks where effort responds to incentives (as measured independently by, for example, response times and pupil dilation) and where increased effort improves performance. Prototypical tasks of this sort are memory or recall tasks (in which paying attention helps), probability matching and multicue probability learning (in which keeping careful track of past trials improves predictions), and clerical tasks (e.g., coding words or building things) which are so mundane that monetary reward induces persistent diligence when intrinsic motivation wanes. In many tasks incentives do not matter, presumably because there is sufficient intrinsic motivation to perform well, or additional effort does not matter because the task is too hard or has a flat payoff frontier. In other tasks incentives can actually hurt, if increased incentives cause people to overlearn a heuristic (in problem-solving "insight" tasks), to overreact to feedback (in some prediction tasks) to exert "too much effort" when a loweffort habit would suffice (choking in sports) or when arousal caused by incentives raises selfconsciousness (test-taking anxiety in education). In the kinds of tasks economists are most interested i...

this article, we present two studies that test these expectations. In the first study, the relationship between the target attribute levels is linear---the value of going from the lowest to the middle level is equivalent to the shift from the middle to the highest level. This linear partworth study provides a test of level and attribute distortions where it is relatively easy for respondents to understand and translate the differential trade-offs between attributes. In the second study, the relationship of levels within attributes is nonlinear, sometimes increasing and other times decreasing with improvements in an attribute. This nonlinear partworth study tests the generality of our results in a more cognitively demanding context and better discriminates among rival theoretical mechanisms

Aimee Drolet, Ellie Fang, Art Markman, Atanu Sinha, the helpful editor, and reviewers; and technical assistance from Carolyn Cohen, Jeff Robinson, Laura Brown, and Noe lle Triaureau. They also thank Bill Yost for recruiting participants from his class. The order of authorship is random. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Shi Zhang, 110 Westwood Plaza B412, UCLA--Anderson School, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Fax: (310) 206-7422. E-mail: shi.zhang@ anderson.ucla.edu. 192 0749-5978/99 $30.00 Copyright # 1999 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Making an option unavailable in this case would have a bigger impact than in a situation in which all options have nonalignable differences. Nonalignable differences are difficult to process and are less likely to make people aware that there is very much information about the options for decision making. This explanation and the interaction effect between option limitation and feature alignability

values can be assigned to dimension values, but this takes effort and may not be intuitive. If possible, items are compared on the basis of specific features, such as "A has more years teaching experience than B." Only when required by lack of agreement on particular dimensions do comparisons involve abstract assessments of the overall value of items.

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