If it works we didn’t need it: Intuitive judgments of ‘overreaction’

When laypeople decide if a costly intervention is an overreaction or an appropriate response, they likely base those judgments on mental simulation about what could happen, or what would have happened without an intervention. To narrow down from the infinite set of possibilities they could consider, they may engage in a process of sampling. We examine whether judgments of overreaction can be explained by a utility-weighted sampling account from the JDM literature, or a norm-weighted sampling account from the causal judgment literature, both, or neither. Three experiments test whether these judgments are overly influenced by low-risk bad outcomes (utility-weighted sampling), or by what is likely and prescriptively good (norm-weighted sampling). Overall, participants’ judgments indicate that they disregard low-risk bad outcomes, and even when a high-risk outcome is successfully avoided, the intervention is an overreaction. These results favor a norm-weighted sampling account in the specific case of evaluating overreactions.