The Evolution of Accuracy and Bias in Social Judgment

Humans are an intensely social species and therefore it is essential for our interpersonal judgments to be valid enough to help us to avoid enemies, form useful alliances and find suitable mates; flawed judgments can literally be fatal. An evolutionary perspective implies that humans ought to have developed sufficient skills at solving problems of interpersonal judgment, including gauging the personalities of others, to be useful for the basic tasks of survival and reproduction. Yet, the view to be derived from the large and influential bias-and-error literature of social psychology is decidedly different—the social mind seems riddled with fundamental design flaws. We will argue in this paper that flawed design is probably the least plausible explanation for the existence of so many errors. We present an evolutionarily-based taxonomy of known bias effects that distinguishes between biases that are trivial or even artifactual and lead virtually nowhere, and those that have interesting implications and deserve further study. Finally, we present an evolutionary perspective that suggests that the ubiquity, automaticity, and success of interpersonal judgment, among other considerations, presents the possibility of a universal Personality Judgment Instinct. Archeological evidence and behavioral patterns observed in extant hunter-gatherer groups indicate that the human species has been intensely social for a long time (e.g., Chagnon, 1983, Tooby & Devore, 1987). Human offspring have a remarkably extended period of juvenile dependency, which both requires and provides the skills for surviving in a complex social world (Hrdy, 1999). Humans evolved language and universal emotional expressions which serve the social purpose of discerning and influencing the thoughts of others (e. and humans will infer social intentions on the basis of minimal cues, as Heider and Simmel (1944) demonstrated in their classic experiment involving chasing triangles and evading circles. Recent work has shown that children above age 4 and adults in disparate cultures (Germans and Amazonian Indians) can categorize intentions—chasing, fighting, following, playing, and courting (for adults)— from no more than the motion patterns of computerized v-shaped arrowheads (Barrett, Todd, Miller, & Blythe, in press). Most notably, humans have a deeply-felt need for social inclusion. Deprivation of social contact produces anxiety, loneliness, and depression (Baumeister & Leary, 1995); indeed, as William James (1890) observed: " Solitary confinement is by many regarded as a mode of torture Accuracy and Bias-3 too cruel and unnatural for civilised countries to adopt. " Participants in laboratory studies who are left out of a face-to-face …