Similarly, what is the substitutability of potential behaviors (or means) to accomplish one’s goals (or ends) when all actions may not be available or equally effective?
In judgment and decision research, the known information makes up the cues and the unknown quantity or event is called the criterion.
al.[1] note that “The mutual substitutability of cues is what system theorists (e.g., Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy[2]) have called equipotentiality.
… The mutual substitutability of responses … have been called equifinality.” (p. 248) Anderson et al.[1] also point out that vicarious mediation is related to redundancy [engineering].
Gigerenzer and Kurz[11] note, “Vicarious functioning describes adaptive cognitive processes that can handle two constraints: the presence of uncertainty and the need for substitution.
Its focus has been on understanding the simple judgment heuristics people use to combine cue information in different types of task environments.
To take an extreme case, if two cues are perfectly correlated, then they will have equal ecological validity and, therefore, be fully redundant in predicting the outcome or distal variable (criterion) of interest.
Failure to select the multiple cues with the highest ecological validities will lead to lower achievement because the task itself has less flexibility and robustness when vicarious mediation is low.
Gigerenzer and Kurtz[11] showed that a simple judgment heuristic called Take the Best (using only the single best predicting cue) could be substituted for far more complex strategies and still maintain or even improve achievement under certain task conditions.
From a methodological perspective, Brunswik advocated naturalistic research and the representative design of experiments to study achievement.