A Parametric Model of Social Judgment

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The proposed research addresses a fundamental psychological question: Under what conditions would available information have an appropriate impact on an individual's judgments? History is filled with examples of people and organizations making faulty judgments and erroneous decisions because they did not take into account all of the relevant information available to them. For example, the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, and the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003 occurred against a background of information whose appropriate consideration may have averted the decisions leading to tragic consequences. The present program of research investigates an overarching model of human judgments designed to address these questions. Essentially, the model asserts that to make impact the information given has to be subjectively relevant to the recipient. But this is not enough. It is incumbent that the recipient recognize the value and relevance of the information that is available. This, in turn, depends on the difficulty of discernment (i.e. the signal to noise ratio of the information) and on the individual's mental and motivational resources needed to overcome the difficulty. The model is tested in reference to a variety of classic judgmental problems identified by social and cognitive psychologists, including the neglect of statistical information, the formation of personality impressions, and the distortions of judgments in the direction of desired beliefs and outcomes. Beyond its interest value in illuminating a major problem in judgment and decision making, the present theory and the proposed research promise to effect a conceptual integration that identifies the critical commonalities shared by numerous separate models in this domain. More generally yet, the present perspective highlights the commonality in basic judgmental process across gender, ethnicity, culture, or age. It stresses that beyond undeniable superficial differences, people share a common humanity as far as their psychological processes are concerned. Understanding these commonalities may contribute to the improvement of communication among individuals and groups of diverse backgrounds.