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The Prototypical Majority Effect (PME) refers to the observation that people endorse majority opinions faster and with greater confidence than minority opinions. Although the PME has been assumed to stem from social influence, recent studies showed that it can arise from internal processes underlying decision and confidence alone. We used a conformity paradigm adapted from Asch (1951) to examine the relative contributions of internal and external processes to the PME. Four participants responded in turn to items that had correct or wrong predetermined majority responses. A robust PME was observed before participants saw others’ responses. Seeing these responses, however, increased endorsement, confidence, and speed. Notably, social influence had a considerably weaker impact when it ran counter to the consensus observed in its absence. Thus, internal processes underlying decision and confidence constrain the impact of social conformity. The failure to consider these processes leads to overestimating the magnitude of social influence.

Previous research showed that a book seems more important when its physical heft is increased through concealed weights. Do such embodied metaphor effects reflect shallow reasoning in the absence of more diagnostic information? To address this issue, participants judged the importance of a heavy versus light book in the presence versus absence of substantive information about its content. Of interest is how participants' disposition to engage in elaborative thought (need for cognition; NFC) moderates the impact of weight. In the absence of substantive information, weight did not exert any influence under high or low need for cognition. In the presence of substantive information, the influence of weight increased with elaborative thought; the heavy book was judged more important by high NFC participants, whereas low NFC participants remained unaffected. This is incompatible with the shallow reasoning assumption; instead, sensory experience exerts its influence through elaborative thought about diagnostic i...

When asked, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” most people respond “Two” despite knowing that Noah rather than Moses was the biblical actor. Two experiments tested the role of processing fluency in the detection of such semantic distortions by presenting questions in an easy or difficult to read print font. As predicted, low processing fluency facilitated detection of the misleading nature of the question and reduced the proportion of erroneous answers. However, low processing fluency also reduced the proportion of correct answers in response to an undistorted question. In both cases, participants were less likely to rely on their spontaneous association when the font was difficult to read, resulting in improved performance on distorted and impaired performance on undistorted questions. We propose that fluency experiences influence processing style.

Most theories treat attitudes as enduring evaluative tendencies; the dispositional focus enjoys intuitive appeal because it is compatible with observers' preference for dispositional explanations (aka fundamental attribution error). From the actor's perspective, evaluation stands in the service of action. Any adaptive system of evaluation needs to be highly sensitive to the specifics of the present, turning deplorable “context dependency“ into laudable “context sensitivity.” Attitude construal theories conceptualize the context sensitivity of evaluative judgment and provide a parsimonious account of core findings of the attitude literature without assuming enduring dispositions; their assumptions are compatible with theories of situated cognition.

Theories of hindsight bias have emphasized the role of declarative information. However, accumulating evidence suggests that the production and reduction of hindsight bias involves an intricate interplay of declarative information and metacognitive experiences. These experiences are informative in their own right and may qualify or even reverse the implications of thought content. We summarize and integrate the available findings in terms of a new model of hindsight bias that includes the interplay between: (a) declarative information, (b) metacognitive experiences, (c) their informational value, and (d) the naive theories used to interpret experiences.

In two experiments, using two different conjunction problems, participants who engaged in avoidance motor actions were significantly more likely to commit conjunction errors than participants who engaged either in approach or no motor actions. Because previous studies (e.g., Friedman & Forster, 2000) have demonstrated that avoidance motor signals enhance analytic processing, whereas approach motor signals enhance heuristic processing, these findings suggest that enhanced heuristic processing does not necessarily lead to an increase in conjunction error. Instead, detail-oriented processing can lead participants to pay too much attention to irrelevant details in a given narrative, which can undermine consistency with normative principles of judgment.

To assess their risk in a particular domain, individuals may review domain-relevant behaviors. Thinking about these behaviors renders two sources of information available: the recalled behaviors and the subjective experience of ease of recall. Two studies demonstrate that individuals' beliefs about the domain can influence which source of information they use. Women high and low in Rape Myth Acceptance (RMA) were asked to recall few (easy) or many (difficult) behaviors that may increase or decrease risk for sexual assault. Women high in RMA relied on ease of recall and reported lower risk after recalling many rather than a few risk-increasing behaviors, or a few rather than many risk-decreasing behaviors. Women low in RMA relied on the content of recall, resulting in an opposite pattern of risk judgments.

The development of the field of cognitive psychology which stresses the importance of social processes for comprehension and production of linguistics utterances sharply contrasts with the direction of social cognition research. An exploration of the “autonomous” versus the “collaborative” view of language understanding is discussed. Two studies are presented which illustrate how subjects conceptualize information which is (1) ambiguous or (2) not semantically ambiguous. Findings show that principles of social cognition and communication can be applied to both natural conversation and data collection in social and psychological research.

According to the cooperative principle of conversation that governs social discourse in everyday life, listeners expect speakers to be relevant, truthful, and informative. In studies on judgmental biases, researchers frequently violate this principle by presenting information that is neither informative nor relevant in a communicative context that suggests otherwise. However, subjects have no reason to doubt the relevance of the presented information and try to make sense of it, as they would be expected to do in everyday life. In Experiment 1, the applicability of the cooperative principle was varied to explore the impact of conversational principles on the apparent overreliance of individuals on nondiagnostic person information at the expense of base-rate information. Nondiagnostic person information was presented either as a statement written by a psychologist or as a random sample of information drawn by a computer. As predicted, subjects relied on the personality information rather than on base-rate ...

Respondents' definition of a target behavior was found to be affected by the frequency range of those response alternatives that assessed the respondents' behavior. Respondents had to report how often they felt “really annoyed.” Response scales ranged either from “less than once a year” to “more than once every 3 months,” or from “less than twice a week” to “several times a day.” Respondents who used the first scale subsequently reported more extreme examples of annoying situations than respondents who used the second one. This suggests that the range of the response alternatives induced respondents to consider different behavioral instances to be the target of the question. Moreover, the different behavioral instances activated by the response scales influenced subjects' interpretation of a related situation, even when an explicit report of an example was not required.