Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T07:14:22.569Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Accuracy in social judgment does not exclude the potential for bias

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2022

Jonathan B. Freeman
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA. jon.freeman@columbia.edu
Kerri L. Johnson
Affiliation:
Department of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Steven J. Stroessner
Affiliation:
Department of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

Abstract

Cesario claims that all bias research tells us is that people “end up using the information they have come to learn as being probabilistically accurate in their daily lives” (sect. 5, para. 4). We expose Cesario's flawed assumptions about the relationship between accuracy and bias. Through statistical simulations and empirical work, we show that even probabilistically accurate responses are regularly accompanied by bias.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Carpinella, C. M., & Johnson, K. L. (2013). Appearance-based politics: Sex-typed facial cues communicate political party affiliation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(1), 156160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, J. B., Johnson, K. L., Ambady, N., & Rule, N. O. (2010). Sexual orientation perception involves gendered facial cues. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 13181331.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hogarth, R. M., & Karelaia, N. (2007). Heuristic and linear models of judgment: Matching rules and environments. Psychological Review, 114(3), 733.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, K. L., Gill, S., Reichman, V., & Tassinary, L. G. (2007). Swagger, sway, and sexuality: Judging sexual orientation from body motion and morphology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(3), 321334.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Garrett, J. V., & Ambady, N. (2010). On the perception of religious group membership from faces. PLoS One, 5(12), e14241.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stern, C., West, T. V., Jost, J. T., & Rule, N. O. (2013). The politics of Gaydar: Ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(3), 520.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 11241131.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed