ABSTRACT
This chapter presents man as dealing with his environment partly through the formation of expectancies that can be compared with actual outcomes or events. The formation of expectancies and the process of comparison are considered fundamental properties of perceptual and judgmental systems. Many psychologists seeking explanations of behavior have found judgment to be a rewarding area of investigation. The normative considerations provide a set of analogies, a framework for the discussion of perceptual expectancy, adaptation, and judgment. An interesting problem for further work would be to examine trial-by-trial changes in expectancy and how each type of contextual trial affects subsequent judgments. The present conception of expectancies is based on the finding that the effect of a cue can be reversed by manipulating its correlation with the judged event. A more general conception of expectancy would take the entire joint distribution into account.
