The Issue of Accuracy in Social Perception and Cognition

Abstract

Interest among researchers in the accuracy of social perception has never waned for long. Admittedly, early accuracy work came to a halt following the publication of critiques of Cronbach and Gage (Cronbach, 1955, 1958; Gage and Cronbach, 1955; Gage, Leavitt, and Stone, 1956) and was supplanted by research on the judgmental process (Jones, 1985; Schneider, Hastorf, and Ellsworth, 1979). The process models, however, though initially descriptive, soon acquired prescriptive or “normative” overtones (Funder, 1987). Accordingly, researchers’ interest in recent years has centered on persons’ tendency to stray from optimal or prescribed modes of judgment (e.g., as embodied in models of statistical inference), and the emphasis shifted from the study of process per se, to the study of bias or inaccuracy (Nisbett and Ross, 1980; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974).