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Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2004

Joachim I. Krueger  and
David C. Funder
Joachim I. Krueger*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, RI02912http://www.brown.edu/departments/psychology/faculty/krueger.html
David C. Funder*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA92506http://www.psych.ucr.edu/faculty/funder/rap/rap.htm
*
joachim_krueger@brown.edu
funder@citrus.ucr.edu
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Abstract:

Mainstream social psychology focuses on how people characteristically violate norms of action through social misbehaviors such as conformity with false majority judgments, destructive obedience, and failures to help those in need. Likewise, they are seen to violate norms of reasoning through cognitive errors such as misuse of social information, self-enhancement, and an over-readiness to attribute dispositional characteristics. The causes of this negative research emphasis include the apparent informativeness of norm violation, the status of good behavior and judgment as unconfirmable null hypotheses, and the allure of counter-intuitive findings. The shortcomings of this orientation include frequently erroneous imputations of error, findings of mutually contradictory errors, incoherent interpretations of error, an inability to explain the sources of behavioral or cognitive achievement, and the inhibition of generalized theory. Possible remedies include increased attention to the complete range of behavior and judgmental accomplishment, analytic reforms emphasizing effect sizes and Bayesian inference, and a theoretical paradigm able to account for both the sources of accomplishment and of error. A more balanced social psychology would yield not only a more positive view of human nature, but also an improved understanding of the bases of good behavior and accurate judgment, coherent explanations of occasional lapses, and theoretically grounded suggestions for improvement.

Keywords

Bayesian inferencebiasesnormative modelspersonalitypositive psychologyrationalityreasoningsocial behaviorsocial judgmentsocial psychology
Type
Research Article
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , June 2004 , pp. 313 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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References

Notes

1. In 18 experimental conditions, compliance ranged from 93% (when the participant did not have to administer shocks personally) to 0% (when two authorities gave contradictory orders, when the experimenter was the victim, and when the victim demanded to be shocked). In the two best-known and most frequently portrayed conditions, when the experimenter was present and the victim could be heard but not seen, the obedience rates were 63% (at Yale) and 48% (at “Research Associates of Bridgeport”). Across all conditions the average rate of compliance was 37.5% (Milgram 1974, Tables 2, 3, 4 and 5).

2. The proportion of interveners in the lowest-helping conditions of the Darley and Latané (1968) and Darley and Batson (1973) studies were, respectively, 31% and 29%; across conditions the average proportions were 59% and 40%.

3. Over the years, cognitive-social psychology and the psychology of judgment and decision-making (JDM) progressively interpenetrated each other. In the classic collection of papers on heuristics and biases (Kahneman et al. 1982), eight of the 35 contributions were authored by social psychologists. Twenty years later, they account for half of the 42 contributions (Gilovich et al. 2002).

4. Without this further assumption the phenomenon would have to be renamed.

5. The same effect was earlier labeled the “correspondence bias” (see Gilbert & Malone 1995) but the more evocative “fundamental” label has come to predominate.

6. In the noncoerced condition the attributed difference in attitudes was 42.2 points; in the coerced condition the difference was 21.2 points.

7. Sheldon and King (2001) reported that an OVID search on the terms error and bias yielded more than twice as many hits as the terms strength and virtue.

8. A recent exception and a potential harbinger of change was an article that included a thorough examination of boundary conditions under which biases are found. As the authors commented, they did “not wish to argue that the [bias under discussion] is a poor strategy” (Goodwin et al. 2002, p. 241). It remains to be seen whether secondary accounts of this research will emphasize these boundary conditions and adaptive possibilities, or simply the finding of bias itself.

9. Intelligence and general well-being are two more examples of variables that probably have modal values higher than the arithmetic mean.

10. See, for example, Klar and Giladi's (1997) report on the “Everyone-is-better-than-average effect.” Although most participants recognized the definitional truth that on average, people are average, the significant minority that erred, erred in the same direction, thereby yielding a difference between the average judgment and the modal judgment.

11. Machiavelli (1513/1966) noted that “Without an opportunity [the abilities of Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus] would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain” (p. 26). According to an apocryphal story, a jealous Serifotis once told Themistokles that he, Themistokles, was famous only because he was an Athenian. The great strategist concurred and observed that he would be as obscure if he were a Serifotis as the Serifotis would be if he were an Athenian.