Social Circle Panel for Studying the Accuracy of Social Judgements

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe NM

Investigators

Abstract

This research project will examine the feasibility, challenges, and potential solutions to collecting valid and reliable data about how people's judgments of their social environments correspond to objective indicators about those environments. The literature in social psychology suggests that human social cognition is fraught with a host of cognitive and motivational biases that are difficult to explain within a coherent theoretical framework. In contrast, research in other fields studying human social behavior as well as some studies in the area of social cognition suggest that people are well attuned to their immediate social environments and that apparent biases may be caused by methodological problems. The data collected in this pilot project will inform this debate and help researchers from psychology, sociology, computational social science, and other fields build more coherent models of cognitive processes underlying social judgments. Many public educational programs rely on spread of knowledge and behaviors through people's networks. Project findings regarding the accuracy of human social judgments will have implications for those programs. The data will be archived in the public repository Open Science Collaboration. This research project will test the feasibility of building an innovative methodological tool called the social circle panel to study the accuracy of people's judgments about the presence of different beliefs and behaviors in their social environments. Social circles will be defined by the frequency of contact. The online panel will aim to include participants with diverse sociodemographic characteristics as well as members of their social circles or personal networks. The panel will enable both the elicitation of subjective judgments of beliefs and behaviors in individuals' social circles, and the evaluation of those judgments against objective data collected from the members of their social circles. It also will enable measurement of the stability of people's judgments over time and the investigation of whether changes in one's social circle are reflected in one's judgments. Building the panel will require dealing with a number of methodological challenges ranging from biased samples to panel contamination. The data produced by this pilot study will be useful for researchers who wish to use similar tools to understand cognitive processes underlying network effects.