The utility of theories in intuitive statistics: The robustness of theory- based judgments.

Research on human judgments demonstrates that people's theories has often bias their evaluation of evidence and suggests that people might be more accurate if they were unbiased by prior beliefs. Rather than comparing people's judgments of data when they do or do not have a prior theory, most studies compare people's estimations to statistical standards, even though the status of these measures as normative criteria is controversial.