Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Story-telling helps to define the human experience. Donarratives also inform our predictions and choices? Thecurrent study provides evidence that they do, using financialdecision-making as an example of a domain where,normatively, publicly available information (about the pastor the future) is irrelevant. Despite this, participants usedpast company performance information to project futureprice trends, as though using affectively laden informationto predict the ending of a story. Critically, these projectionswere stronger when information concerned predictionsabout a company’s future performance rather than actualdata about its past performance, suggesting that people notonly rely on financially irrelevant (but narratively relevant)information for making predictions, but erroneously imposetemporal order on that information.