Rationality Vs. Accuracy of Social Judgment

Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition

“…We are encouraged by the increasing popularity of methods that decompose judgment into theoretically meaningful components (Lambert et al;Swets et al 2000). The specific appeal of these methods is that they guard against the temptation to treat any significant sign of bias as an indication of inaccuracy (see also Hastie & Rasinski 1987;Wright & Drinkwater 1997). For a recent compendium of further methodological advances (e.g., simulations, connectionist modeling, meta-analysis), we recommend the handbook published by Reis and Judd (2000).…”

Illusory Price Increases after the Euro Changeover in Germany: An Expectancy-Consistent Bias

“…This phenomenon -labelled expectancy-consistent judgment bias -has been documented in different research contexts within social psychological research over the past 60 years (e.g., Greenwald et al 1986), such as the primacy effect in impression formation (Asch 1946;Hogarth and Einhorn 1992), stereotypes (Darley and Gross 1983;Stone et al 1997), the perseverance of beliefs that have been discredited (Anderson and Kellam 1992;Anderson and Lindsay 1998;Lepper et al 1986;Ross et al 1975), the conservatism effect (Phillips and Edwards 1966;Koehler 1996;Wright and Drinkwater 1997), the perception of illusory correlation (Chapman and Chapman 1967;Hamilton and Rose 1980;Billman et al 1992), and maintenance of erroneous initial individual (Greitemeyer and Schulz-Hardt 2003) and group decision preferences (Greitemeyer et al 2006).…”

Judgment and Decision Making

“…An important, often tacit, assumption is that failing to follow these rules will lead to decreased real-world performance. However, somewhat paradoxically, research examining real-world performance has concluded that people are surprisingly accurate (e.g., Ambady, Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000;Brehmer & Joyce, 1988;Funder, 1987;Wright & Drinkwater, 1997), even though these judgments are often based on very little information and the judges have little or no insight into how they made them (Ambady et al, 2000; see also Hogarth, 2001).…”