Thinking in a Social Context

Abstract

Abstract People do much of their thinking in a social context by drawing on information provided by others and sharing their own judgments with others. This information exchange is guided by the tacit assumptions underlying the conduct of conversations in everyday life. This chapter reviews these assumptions and their implications for social cognition research. It highlights that many familiar biases and shortcomings of human judgment reflect, in part, a basic misunderstanding about the nature of communication in research situations. Whereas participants assume that researchers are cooperative communicators, whose contributions are informative, relevant, and clear, the researchers may (deliberately or inadvertently) present information that does not meet these criteria. When this misconception is avoided, many familiar biases are attenuated or eliminated, suggesting that they are the result of faulty communication rather than faulty judgment.