Cognitive Strategies for Peer Judgments

Abstract

How do people make judgments about characteristics of their peers? We investigate what cognitive strategies underlie peer judgments, what group-level patterns of judgments do these strategies produce, and whether they generate accurate judgments. We develop a general model that allows for comparison of different cognitive strategies including ego-projection, frequency-based, memory, and inference strategies. We apply it on a unique data set including self-reports and peer judgments of substance use among homeless youth (N=239). We find evidence for the adaptive use of strategies that are most appropriate given the information available from one’s personal experience and social environment. On the group level, the pattern of judgments sometimes resembles false consensus, but overall shows a high level of accuracy.

Human social sensing is an untapped resource for computational social science

“…Computational models of belief dynamics can be further improved by explicitly incorporating social sensing processes. Rather than assuming that everyone has the same representation of the social world, different people might be more or less likely to detect others' beliefs, and beliefs about different issues might be more or less socially visible 3,159,160 . Without taking social sensing processes into account, one might inaccurately conclude that differences in the spread of beliefs stem from differences in objective social network structures, whereas in fact the differences might stem from what people perceive subjectively.…”

“…This line of research shows that friends can accurately judge one another's characteristics, although there is also evidence for projection of one's own characteristics to others 188,189 . This 'ego projection' can be rational, as in many social environments one is right to assume that most others are similar to oneself 190 and this assumption can produce accurate estimates about other individuals 159 .…”