The present study examined the use of consensus information in early childhood. Ninety-six three- to six-year-olds watched a demonstration that depicted the positive or negative behavior of one or several actors toward a recipient (low vs. high consensus, respectively). Subsequently, participants made behavioral predictions and personality…

Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) write of a thing with which scientists and scholars are all too familiar, the assessment of published research and of its authors. The author was startled to discover how little the agenda of the paper seems to engage with factors one relies on for salary and promotion…

Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon called "Belief Bias" in which subjects rate the strength of arguments based on the believability of the conclusions. This paper reports the results of a small qualitative pilot study of undergraduate students who had previously taken an algebra-based introduction to statistics class. The subjects in this…

This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting: heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map…

Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluations of information to support a tentatively preferred option? The authors test the following 3 decision process goals as the potential drivers of such distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of evaluating new information, (b) to increase the separation…

This monograph discusses prejudice which exists when humans evaluate others. No one sees or hears a man evaluating. One hears or sees only what he says and does. An arbitrary sampling of recent research studies which indicate some of the varieties of mis-evaluation are cited. They reveal that sometimes people show antipathy to people they do not…

The use of intuition in educational decisions disposes educators to emotional arousal and biases. An excessively methodical approach is also criticized. This study tested a decision-making procedure, the Simple Decision Process (SDP), that integrates both approaches. One hundred and seventy four teachers studied a number of dilemmas (i.e.,…

A national movement that claims its purpose is to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity is beginning to take root in several states. A state legislative panel begins investigating whether Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities are indoctrinating students in left-wing ideology. Student monitors on a campus in Colorado tell…

Hindsight bias is the phenomenon that after people are presented with the correct answer to a question, their judgment regarding their own past answer to this question is biased toward the correct answer. In three experiments, younger and older adults gave numerical responses to general-knowledge questions and later attempted to recall their…

Two studies investigated the possibility that assessment of confidence is biased by attempts to justify chosen answers. These attempts include selectively focusing on evidence supporting the chosen answer and disregarding contradictory evidence. Results suggest that confidence depends on the amount and strength of evidence supporting the answer…

Biases in social comparative judgments, such as those illustrated by above-average and comparative-optimism effects, are often regarded as products of motivated reasoning (e.g., self-enhancement). These effects, however, can also be produced by information-processing limitations or aspects of judgment processes that are not necessarily biased by…

Contrasted a debiasing condition, in which undergraduate subjects (N=73) were warned of possible anchoring errors and how to avoid them, with a no-debiasing condition. Results indicated that debiasing was irrelevant because neither the replication sample nor the debiased sample demonstrated significant anchoring errors in their judgments. (LLL)

Causes of evaluator bias are: overemphasizing concrete, salient, and retrievable information; reporting only evidence which confirms hypothesis; focusing on stable personality factors, rather than on situation and environment; developing positive perceptions of a program as both an evaluator and a highly involved participant; statistical naivete;…