Judgment in a Social Context: Biases, Shortcomings, and the Logic of Conversation

Publisher Summary The chapter focuses on the contribution of conversational processes to the emergence of biases and shortcomings in human judgment, drawing on research in judgment and decision making, attitude measurement, and questionnaire construction. The chapter discusses the logic of conversation in everyday life and in research settings. One of the key assumptions underlying the conduct of conversation holds that all information contributed by participants is relevant to the goal of the ongoing conversation. The chapter illustrates that the biasing effects of questions are mediated by researchers' violations of conversational norms and respondents' erroneous assumption that the questioner is a cooperative communicator. The chapter discusses the formal features of questionnaire construction, such as the specific numeric values presented as part of a rating scale or the range of response alternatives presented as part of a behavioral frequency question, may strongly influence the obtained responses. Experimental studies on the impact of open- and closed-response formats have consistently demonstrated that open- and closed-response formats, yielding considerable differences in the marginal distribution as well as the ranking of items. Unless there is reason to believe that the questioner did not understand the answer already given, the person asked is likely to interpret the second question as a request for new information. =