Psychological proximity improves reasoning in academic aptitude tests.

Performance on standardized academic aptitude tests (AAT) can determine important life outcomes. However, it is not clear whether and which aspects of the content of test questions affect performance. We examined the effect of psychological distance embedded in test questions.

The Effect of the Raters' Marginal Distributions on Their Matched Agreement: A Rescaling Framework for Interpreting Kappa.

Cohen's κ measures the improvement in classification above chance level and it is the most popular measure of interjudge agreement. Yet, there is considerable confusion about its interpretation. Specifically, researchers often ignore the fact that the observed level of matched agreement is bounded from above and below and the bounds are a function of the particular marginal distributions of the table.

You say "probable" and I say "likely": improving interpersonal communication with verbal probability phrases.

When forecasters and decision makers describe uncertain events using verbal probability terms, there is a risk of miscommunication because people use different probability phrases and interpret them in different ways. In an effort to facilitate the communication process, the authors investigated various ways of converting the forecasters' verbal probabilities to the decision maker's terms. The authors present 3 studies in which participants judged the probabilities of distinct events using both numerical and verbal probabilities.