ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1597227
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring Human-Autonomous Interactions: Agency, Awareness, and Ethical ImplicationsView all 4 articles
The Impact of Distribution Properties on Sampling Behavior
Provisionally accepted
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study examines how biases in information search behavior, particularly the tendency to over-sample rare outcomes, influence the perception and evaluation of numerical distributions. Participants in an online experiment (n = 145) disproportionately sampled rare events more in skewed distributions, leading to overestimations of positively skewed distributions and underestimations of negatively skewed ones. While increasing the total number of samples reduced estimation errors, participants also made cognitive adjustments by partially compensating for their oversampling of rare events when estimating means. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between information search biases and cognitive processes in decision-making and search behavior, with implications for various human-algorithm interaction contexts such as e-commerce, social media usage, and even morally complex scenarios such as politics.
Keywords: Search behavior, decision-making, skewed distributions, Rare outcomes, Estimation accuracy
Received: 20 Mar 2025; Accepted: 09 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cao and Scheibehenne. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Thai Quoc Cao, thaicao1491@gmail.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.