Social Circle Panel for Studying the Accuracy of Social Judgements

该研究项目将研究收集有关人们对其社会环境的判断如何与这些环境的客观指标相对应的有效和可靠数据的可行性，挑战和潜在解决方案。 社会心理学的文献表明，人类的社会认知充满了大量的认知和动机偏见，这些偏见很难在一个连贯的理论框架内解释。相反，其他研究人类社会行为的领域以及社会认知领域的一些研究表明，人们能够很好地适应他们的直接社会环境，而明显的偏见可能是由方法问题引起的。 在这个试点项目中收集的数据将为这场辩论提供信息，并帮助心理学，社会学，计算社会科学和其他领域的研究人员建立更连贯的社会判断认知过程模型。 许多公共教育项目依赖于通过人们的网络传播知识和行为。 关于人类社会判断准确性的项目发现将对这些项目产生影响。 该研究项目将测试建立一种称为社交圈面板的创新方法工具的可行性，以研究人们对社会环境中不同信仰和行为的存在的判断的准确性。 社交圈将由联系的频率来定义。 在线小组的目标是包括具有不同社会人口特征的参与者及其社交圈或个人网络的成员。该小组将能够在个人的社交圈中引发对信仰和行为的主观判断，并根据从其社交圈成员收集的客观数据对这些判断进行评估。 它还可以测量人们的判断随时间的稳定性，并调查一个人的社交圈的变化是否反映在一个人的判断中。 建立该小组将需要处理从有偏见的样本到小组污染等一系列方法学挑战。 这项试点研究产生的数据将有助于希望使用类似工具来了解网络效应背后的认知过程的研究人员。

This research project will examine the feasibility, challenges, and potential solutions to collecting valid and reliable data about how people's judgments of their social environments correspond to objective indicators about those environments. The literature in social psychology suggests that human social cognition is fraught with a host of cognitive and motivational biases that are difficult to explain within a coherent theoretical framework. In contrast, research in other fields studying human social behavior as well as some studies in the area of social cognition suggest that people are well attuned to their immediate social environments and that apparent biases may be caused by methodological problems. The data collected in this pilot project will inform this debate and help researchers from psychology, sociology, computational social science, and other fields build more coherent models of cognitive processes underlying social judgments. Many public educational programs rely on spread of knowledge and behaviors through people's networks. Project findings regarding the accuracy of human social judgments will have implications for those programs. The data will be archived in the public repository Open Science Collaboration.This research project will test the feasibility of building an innovative methodological tool called the social circle panel to study the accuracy of people's judgments about the presence of different beliefs and behaviors in their social environments. Social circles will be defined by the frequency of contact. The online panel will aim to include participants with diverse sociodemographic characteristics as well as members of their social circles or personal networks. The panel will enable both the elicitation of subjective judgments of beliefs and behaviors in individuals' social circles, and the evaluation of those judgments against objective data collected from the members of their social circles. It also will enable measurement of the stability of people's judgments over time and the investigation of whether changes in one's social circle are reflected in one's judgments. Building the panel will require dealing with a number of methodological challenges ranging from biased samples to panel contamination. The data produced by this pilot study will be useful for researchers who wish to use similar tools to understand cognitive processes underlying network effects.