Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgment.

Abstract

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. The accuracy of human social judgment is a topic of obvious interest and importance. It is only natural to wonder to what degree the judgments we make of the personalities of ourselves and others might be right or wrong, and to desire to improve our accuracy. Nonpsychologists are often surprised and disappointed, therefore, when they begin to take psychology courses and discover that the field has largely foresworn interest in the accuracy issue. The discipline's early, direct interest in accuracy (e.g., Estes, 1938; Taft, 1955; Vernon, 1933) was all but completely stifled some years ago by the publication of a series of methodological critiques by Cronbach (1955), Hastorf and Bender (1952), and others. As a result, according to one authoritative textbook: The accuracy issue has all but faded from view in recent years, at least for personality judgments. There is not much present interest in questions about whether people are accurate... . There is, in short, almost no concern with normative questions of accuracy. On the other hand, in recent years there has been a renewed interest in how, why, and in what circumstances people are inaccurate. (Schneider, Hastorf, & Ellsworth, 1979, p. 224; see also Cook, 1984)' Specifically, the psychology of social judgment has been dominated in recent years by a flood of research on the subject of "error." Studies of error appear in the literature at a prodigious rate, are disproportionately likely to be cited (Christensen-Sza

Close-call counterfactuals and belief-system defenses: I was not almost wrong but I was almost right.

“…It is thus possible to escape many of the objections that have been raised to traditional laboratory demonstrations of error and bias (cf. Funder, 1987;Kruglanski, 1989). The data revealed, for example, that experts differed from nonexperts in the confidence they attached to domain-relevant forecasts but not in the accuracy of those forecasts-a result that would lose much of its impact had the demonstration involved simulated, rather than actual political events.…”

Using Multiple Methods in Personality Psychology.

“…In most cases, the convergence averages between .3 and .6 (Funder, 1987). One of the clear conceptual and methodological advances in the field of personality psychology is the Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM; Funder, 1995), which provides a clear theoretical model identifying why identity and reputation are not more highly correlated.…”

The benefits of positive illusions: Idealization and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships.

“…For example, Funder (1987) argued that interjudge agreement is the best, perhaps the only, definition of accuracy or truth. In indexing actors' illusions, we followed this same line of logic, partialing "truth" (i.e., shared judgments) out of actors' perceptions.…”