When people receive new information, sometimes they revise their beliefs too much, and sometimes too little. In this paper, we show that a key driver of whether people overinfer or underinfer is the strength of the information. Based on a model in which people know which direction to update in, but not exactly how much to update, we hypothesize that people will overinfer from weak signals and underinfer from strong signals. We then test this hypothesis across four different environments: abstract experiments, a naturalistic experiment, sports betting markets, and financial markets. In each environment, our consistent and robust finding is overinference from weak signals and underinference from strong signals. Our framework and findings can help harmonize apparently contradictory results from the experimental and empirical literatures.

中文翻译：

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弱信号的过度推理和强信号的欠推理


当人们收到新信息时，有时他们会过多地修正自己的信念，有时又会修正得太少。在本文中，我们表明人们是过度推理还是低推理的一个关键驱动因素是信息的强度。基于一个模型，在这个模型中，人们知道要向哪个方向更新，但不知道确切地要更新多少，我们假设人们会从弱信号中过度推断，而从强信号中进行不足推断。然后，我们在四个不同的环境中检验了这一假设：抽象实验、自然主义实验、体育博彩市场和金融市场。在每种环境中，我们一致且稳健的发现是弱信号的过度推理和强信号的欠推理。我们的框架和发现可以帮助协调实验和实证文献中明显矛盾的结果。