Stereotypes and social judgment.

In 5 experiments, 272 university students were initially exposed to an induction series in which there was a systematic association between the amount of psychopathology that was implied by various behavior samples and other readily discernable aspects of these samples (i.e., correlated cues). In 2 studies, for example, a series of confused definitions or nonpathological definitions were described as coming from patients at psychiatric or general hospitals. The introduction of correlated cues often produced contrast effects, suggesting that Ss may have evaluated the test definitions by implicitly comparing them to other definitions from that category (e.g., other definitions from the same hospital). Assimilation effects were observed when Ss were required to indicate their overall impressions of a given patient, or group of patients, before evaluating a particular definition. Findings are discussed in terms of priming and stereotyping. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intrinsic dynamics of social judgment.

Ss expressed their moment-to-moment feelings about a target on a computer screen. In the 1st study, the target was a positive, negative, or mixed-valence acquaintance; in the 2nd study, the target was a liked vs disliked acquaintance who committed a positive vs negative act. Several dynamic measures were derived from the positioning of the cursor (sampled 10 times per sec) over a 2-min period. The dimension of the structure underlying the observed dynamics was also assessed. Both sets of measures varied meaningfully across targets (e.g., feelings changed at a relatively fast and unstable rate for mixed-valence targets) and were correlated with self-report measures (e.g., instability in rate of movement was associated with self-reported uncertainty in feelings). Discussion centers on the viability and usefulness of framing social judgment in terms of dynamical systems concepts and principles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex stereotypes and social judgment.

Tested the assumption that sexual stereotypic beliefs affect the judgments of individuals in an experiment with 98 male and 97 female undergraduates. No evidence was found for effects of stereotypes on Ss' judgments about a target individual. Instead, Ss judgments were strongly influenced by behavioral information about the target. To explain these results, it is noted that the predicted effects of social stereotypes on judgments conform to Bayes' theorem for the normative use of prior probabilities in judgment tasks, inasmuch as stereotypic beliefs may be regarded as intuitive estimates for the probabilities of traits in social groups. Research in the psychology of prediction has demonstrated that people often neglect prior probabilities when making predictions about people, especially when they have individuating information about the person that is subjectively diagnostic of the criterion. An implication of this research is that a minimal amount of subjectively diagnostic target case information should be sufficient to eradicate effects of stereotypes on judgments. Results of a 2nd experiment with 75 female and 55 male undergraduates support this argument. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Happiness and stereotypic thinking in social judgment.

Four experiments examined the effects of happiness on the tendency to use stereotypes in social judgment. In each experiment, individuals who had been induced to feel happy rendered more stereotypic judgments than did those in a neutral mood. Exp 1 demonstrated this phenomenon with a mood induction procedure that involved recalling life experiences. Exps 2 and 3 suggested that the greater reliance on stereotypes evident in the judgments of happy individuals was not attributable to cognitive capacity deficits created by intrusive happy thoughts or by cognitively disruptive excitement or energetic arousal that may accompany the experience of happiness. In Exp 4, happy individuals again were found to render more stereotypic judgments, except under conditions in which they had been told that they would be held accountable for their judgments. These results suggest that although happy people's tendency to engage in stereotypic thinking may be pervasive, they are quite capable of avoiding the influence of stereotypes in their judgments when situational factors provide a motivational impetus for such effort. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Certainty of judgment and resistance to social influence.

The present note presents evidence on the importance of certainty, obtained under conditions where there are marked individual differences in reactions to a given stimulus and associated differences in certainty of judgment. The method involved the use of phenylthiourea (also known as phenylthiocarbamide), referred to as PTU. The subjects, Yale University upperclassmen, were told that we were trying to find out "whether there are absolute values for these tastes or whether there are individual differences in ratings of them." He was then given a form, asked to taste Label A, and instructed to give it a rating of 5 (average) on the scale of pleasantness. He was then asked to taste B and C, and to rate each one in relation to A. After rating B, he was asked to rate his certainty that B should be given the pleasantness rating he had given it. A similar procedure was followed for C. On the basis of these private judgments, the Ss were scheduled in 30 three-man groups, half composed of one taster and two nontasters and half, of two tasters and one nontaster. The instructions were similar to those used earlier, except that certainty ratings were not requested and the Ss were asked to announce their ratings publicly, each one first giving his rating of B, and then of C. Each time, the majority persons, whether tasters or nontasters, were asked to announce their ratings first. When it came his turn on B, the minority person usually found that the others had given ratings similar to his private ones. But on C, he found that their ratings were markedly different from his own evaluation. It was found that the effects of majority opinion were markedly different depending upon whether the minority persons were tasters or nontasters of PTU. The data suggest that this asymmetric effect, whereby nontasters are more susceptible to majority influence, may be attributable to the stronger reactions tasters have to PTU and the resulting greater certainty they have about their judgments of the substance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Egocentric definitions of traits and abilities in social judgment.

People possess idiosyncratic, self-serving definitions of traits and abilities. This observation was supported by 6 studies in which people articulated the performances along behavioral criteria (e.g., math Scholastic Achievement Test score) necessary to "qualify" for relevant traits (e.g., math ability) or made judgments about performances attained by other people. When making judgments of others, high-performing Ss tended to rate target performances less favorably than did low-performing Ss, with these disagreements most pronounced when the target's performance was low. These disagreements were mediated neither by perceptions of trait importance nor by differing beliefs about the distribution of performances along the behavioral metrics. Discussion centers on avenues for further study and on similarities and differences between these studies and classic work on attitudinal judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Person perception and the bounded rationality of social judgment.

In this article, we develop a bounded rationality view of the relation between person perception and social behavior. Two theses of this approach are that behaviors vary in their significance to observers, and that observers pursue bounded rather than global utility in forming personality impressions. Observers are expected to be sensitive to targets' overall behavioral tendencies and to the variability of their behavior across situations, but both sensitivities are bounded, being greater for behaviors that directly affect observers' outcomes. In two investigations involving extensive hourly and 6-s observations, we examined the bounded utility of people's impressions of personality, demonstrating how impression accuracy is linked to the significance of behaviors. Observers were sensitive to the organization of aggressive behaviors, but less sensitive to the organization of withdrawn behaviors, even when the consistency of those behaviors was comparable. The results clarify the relation between people's inferential shortcomings in laboratory paradigms and the bounded utility of person perception in the natural environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparison processes in social judgment: Mechanisms and consequences.

This article proposes an informational perspective on comparison consequences in social judgment. It is argued that to understand the variable consequences of comparison, one has to examine what target knowledge is activated during the comparison process. These informational underpinnings are conceptualized in a selective accessibility model that distinguishes 2 fundamental comparison processes. Similarity testing selectively makes accessible knowledge indicating target-standard similarity, whereas dissimilarity testing selectively makes accessible knowledge indicating target-standard dissimilarity. These respective subsets of target knowledge build the basis for subsequent target evaluations, so that similarity testing typically leads to assimilation whereas dissimilarity testing typically leads to contrast. The model is proposed as a unifying conceptual framework that integrates diverse findings on comparison consequences in social judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The truth and bias model of judgment.

We present a new model for the general study of how the truth and biases affect human judgment. In the truth and bias model, judgments about the world are pulled by 2 primary forces, the truth force and the bias force, and these 2 forces are interrelated. The truth and bias model differentiates force and value, where the force is the strength of the attraction and the value is the location toward which the judgment is attracted. The model also makes a formal theoretical distinction between bias and moderator variables. Two major classes of biases are discussed: biases that are measured with variables (e.g., assumed similarity) and directional bias, which refers to the extent to which judgments are pulled toward 1 end of the judgment continuum. Moderator variables are conceptualized as variables that affect the accuracy and bias forces but that do not affect judgments directly. We illustrate the model with 4 examples. We discuss the theoretical, empirical, methodological, measurement, and design implications of the model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generality of the effects of practice on social judgment tasks.

Many types of social and nonsocial cognitive processes can be performed faster after they have been practiced. Two experiments examine some properties of this speedup, particularly its pattern of generality, to give indications as to its underlying theoretical basis. For example, consider a person who practices judging whether a number of behaviors imply a particular target trait. Is the resulting increase in speed specific to the behaviors judged, does it apply to judgments of new behaviors with respect to the same target trait, or is it applicable to all judgments using the same process, even for different target traits? These experiments identify components of speedup that show each of these patterns. The results show that general procedures can be strengthened by practice and contradict the notion that speedup is purely a function of increased accessibility of schemas or other memory structures representing knowledge about the judgment target. The effects of practice need not be content-specific. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgment.

Laboratory research on "error" in social judgment has largely supplanted research that addresses accuracy issues more directly. Moreover, this research attracts a great deal of attention because of what many take to be its dismal implications for the accuracy of human social reasoning. These implications are illusory, however, because an error is not the same thing as a "mistake." An error is a judgment of an experimental stimulus that departs from a model of the judgment process. If this model is normative, then the error can be said to represent an incorrect judgment. A mistake, by contrast, is an incorrect judgment of a real-world stimulus and therefore more difficult to determine. Although errors can be highly informative about the process of judgment in general, they are not necessarily relevant to the content or accuracy of particular judgments, because errors in a laboratory may not be mistakes with respect to a broader, more realistic frame of reference and the processes that produce such errors might lead to correct decisions and adaptive outcomes in real life. Several examples are described in this article. Accuracy issues cannot be addressed by research that concentrates on demonstrating error in relation to artificial stimuli, but only by research that uses external, realistic criteria for accuracy. These criteria might include the degree to which judgments agree with each other and yield valid predictions of behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stereotypes and social judgment: The consequences of group variability.

The present investigation examined the effects of group variability on judgments of single group members. Male and female participants formed impressions of a group of 50 men or women on the basis of their performance on a test of perceptual-motor skills. The variability of group performance varied across conditions. Participants then made speeded typicality judgments and ability ratings of several "new" group members whose performance varied in its discrepancy from the group. Compared with participants in the high variability condition, participants in the low variability condition were (a) more likely to judge discrepant group members as atypical and (b) faster to assess their atypicality. This latter effect decreased the probability that participants in the low variability condition used the group as a basis for judging atypical group members. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion concepts and emotional states in social judgment and categorization.

An objection to conclusions of research investigating effects of emotions on cognitive processes is that the effects are due to the activation of semantic concepts rather than to emotional feelings. A sentence unscrambling task was developed to prime concepts of happiness, sadness, or neutral ideas. Pilot studies demonstrated that unscrambling emotional sentences did not affect emotional state but did prime semantically related words. Experiment 1 showed that the induction of emotional state but not the sentence unscrambling task produced emotion-congruent judgments. Results of Experiment 2 showed that individuals in emotional states categorized according to emotional equivalence more often than participants in a neutral state. Sentence unscrambling had no effect on emotional response categorization. The influences of emotions and emotion knowledge in cognition and emotion are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment.

Proposes that several biases in social judgment result from a failure to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite position, therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In 2 experiments, with 150 undergraduates, this reasoning was applied to 2 domains—biased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Ss were induced to consider the opposite through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments, the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demand-laden alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. Results are consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and they suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The social context of reasoning: Conversational inference and rational judgment.

Social rules governing communication require the listener to go beyond the information given in a message, contrary to the assumption that rational people should operate only on the information explicitly given in judgment tasks. An attributional model of conversational inference is presented that shows how hearers' message interpretations are guided by their perceptions of the speaker. The model is then applied to the analysis of experiments on reasoning processes in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and decision research. It is shown that the model can predict how experimental manipulations of relevant source and message attributes affect respondents' judgments. Failure to recognize the role of conversational assumptions in governing inference processes can lead rational responses to be misclassified as errors and their source misattributed to cognitive shortcomings in the decision maker. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment.

Several modifications of the Asch experiment in which the S judges the length of lines in the company of a group of "stooges" who carry out the experimenter's instructions are described. These include a face-to-face situation, an anonymous situation, and a group situation, with self-commitment, public commitment and Magic Pad commitment variations. The results indicate that, even when normative social influence in the direction of an incorrect judgment is largely removed (as in the anonymous situation), more errors are made by Ss in experimental groups than by Ss making their judgments when alone. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)