Social Circle Panel for Studying the Accuracy of Social Judgements

这项研究项目将研究收集有效和可靠的数据的可行性、挑战和潜在的解决方案，这些数据是关于人们对社会环境的判断如何与关于这些环境的客观指标相对应的。社会心理学的文献表明，人类的社会认知充满了许多认知和动机偏差，这些偏见很难在连贯的理论框架内得到解释。相比之下，研究人类社会行为的其他领域的研究以及社会认知领域的一些研究表明，人们很好地适应了他们所处的社会环境，明显的偏见可能是由方法问题造成的。在这个试点项目中收集的数据将为这场辩论提供信息，并帮助来自心理学、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认知过程模型，这些模型是社会判断的基础。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。有关人类社会判断准确性的项目发现将对这些项目产生影响。这些数据将被存档在公共资源库开放科学合作中。这个研究项目将测试建立一种名为社交圈小组的创新方法工具的可行性，以研究人们对其社会环境中存在不同信仰和行为的判断的准确性。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以及他们的社交圈或个人关系网的成员。该小组将能够激发个人社交圈中对信仰和行为的主观判断，并根据从其社交圈成员那里收集的客观数据对这些判断进行评估。它还将能够衡量人们随着时间的推移判断的稳定性，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。建造太阳能电池板将需要处理从有偏差的样品到电池板污染等一系列方法学挑战。这项初步研究产生的数据将对希望使用类似工具来理解网络效应背后的认知过程的研究人员很有用。

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.