Perception of social distributions.

Accurate representation of the distribution of social attitudes and behaviors can guide effective social behavior and is often essential for correct inferences. We examined the accuracy of people's beliefs about the distributions of a large number of attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In two studies we measured actual attitudes and behaviors in a student population, and we assessed beliefs by asking subjects to estimate the distribution of 100 students on these dimensions. We examined the accuracy of subjects' perceptions of the means, standard deviations, and distribution shapes. Subjects showed a number of systematic biases, including overestimation of dispersion and overestimation of the means of behavioral distributions and a false consensus bias, but their overall accuracy was impressive.

[1]  E. E. Jones,et al.  The perception of variability within in-groups and out-groups: Implications for the law of small numbers. , 1980 .

[2]  H. Tajfel.  Experiments in intergroup discrimination. , 1970 .

[3]  C. Judd,et al.  Attitudes, polarization, and diagnosticity: Exploring the effect of affect. , 1981 .

[4]  H. M. Jenkins,et al.  Discrimination learning with the distinctive feature on positive or negative trials , 1970 .

[5]  A. Tversky,et al.  On the psychology of prediction , 1973 .

[6]  L. Ross,et al.  Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. , 1981 .

[7]  L. Ross,et al.  The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes , 1977 .

[8]  R. Sainsbury,et al.  Discrimination learning utilizing positive or negative cues. , 1973 .

[9]  H. Kelley.  Attribution theory in social psychology , 1967 .

[10]  S. Coren,et al.  Attention : contemporary theory and analysis , 1972 .

[11]  L. Doob,et al.  Factors Determining National Stereotypes , 1943 .

[12]  Timothy D. Wilson,et al.  Insensitivity to sample bias: Generalizing from atypical cases , 1980 .

[13]  R. Nisbett,et al.  The psychometrics of everyday life , 1986, Cognitive Psychology.

[14]  Donald T. Campbell,et al.  Stereotypes and the perception of group differences. , 1967 .

[15]  A. Tversky,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[16]  S. Worchel,et al.  Psychology of intergroup relations , 1986 .

[17]  G. W. Snedecor.  Statistical Methods , 1964 .

[18]  A. Tversky,et al.  Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness , 1972 .

[19]  James M. Fields,et al.  Public Beliefs About the Beliefs of the Public , 1976 .

[20]  S. Fulero,et al.  From individual to group impressions: Availability heuristics in stereotype formation , 1978 .

[21]  Paul Thagard,et al.  Variability and confirmation , 1982 .

[22]  D. Krantz,et al.  The use of statistical heuristics in everyday inductive reasoning , 1983 .

[23]  H. M. Jenkins,et al.  The display of information and the judgment of contingency. , 1965, Canadian journal of psychology.

[24]  Russell H. Fazio,et al.  The feature-positive effect in the self-perception process: Does not doing matter as much as doing? , 1982 .

[25]  W. E. Vinacke.  Stereotyping among national-racial groups in Hawaii; a study in ethnocentrism. , 1949, The Journal of social psychology.

[26]  David H. Krantz,et al.  Inductive reasoning: Competence or skill? , 1983, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[27]  M. Posner,et al.  On the genesis of abstract ideas. , 1968, Journal of experimental psychology.

[28]  L. Beach,et al.  Man as an Intuitive Statistician , 2022 .

[29]  Daniel Kahneman,et al.  Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability , 1973 .

[30]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Induction of category distributions: a framework for classification learning. , 1984, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.