Metacognition in Health Judgment

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议的研究旨在提高人们对群体规范的估计及其在个人层面健康态度和行为中的作用的心理过程的现有知识。过去的研究表明，社会规范强烈影响人们的个人健康态度和行为，而对多元无知的研究表明，个人经常误判群体规范。因此，人们的个人态度和行为可能会受到实际上并不存在的“规范”的影响。拟议中的研究将元认知研究与群体感知研究结合起来，研究人们为什么会犯这样的社会判断错误。实验1-2考察个体在推断群体支持健康行为时是否使用其元认知经验。这些实验操纵参与者对规范的流畅感，并评估它如何影响他们对群体支持的看法。实验3-4关注的是通过参照群体规范产生社会影响的过程。过去的研究表明，社会影响可能是一个有意识和深思熟虑的过程，而目前的研究假设它也可以自动起作用。了解社会规范构建的过程将促进当前对社会判断的理解，并深入了解群体层面的判断如何影响个人层面的健康行为。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed research is designed to advance current knowledge about the psychological processes underlying people's estimates of group norms and their role in individual-level health attitudes and behavior. Where past work demonstrates that social norms strongly influence people's personal health attitudes and behaviors, research on pluralistic ignorance shows that individuals often misjudge group norms. Thus, people's personal attitudes and behaviors may be affected by "norms" that do not actually exist. The proposed studies integrate work on metacognition with work on group perception to examine why people make such social judgment errors. Experiments 1-2 investigate whether individuals use their metacognitive experiences when making inferences about group support for health behaviors. These experiments manipulate participants' feelings of fluency for a norm and assess how it influences their perceptions of group support. Experiments 3-4 focus on the processes that underlie social influence via reference group norms. Where past work suggests that social influence may be a conscious and deliberative process, the current studies hypothesize it can also act automatically. Understanding the processes underlying social norm construction will advance current understanding of social judgment and give insight into how group-level judgments influence individual-level health behavior.