The effects of judgmental orientation on predictions were explored in a series of studies. Three experiments examined the proposition that the underuse of baserate information in predictions may be partly due to differential judgmental orientations induced by (a) the context of the problem or (b) the formulation of the problem and the features of the base-rate information. In the first study a scientific or clinical judgmental orientation was experimentally induced in subjects. In subsequent prediction tasks, scientific subjects assigned much greater weight to baserate information than clinical subjects. In the second study the effects of differential orientations were explored in a natural context among medical doctors. First-year medical students committed the ordinary base-rate fallacy, but residents showed a reversal of the effect and overused base-rate information in their predictions. The third study indicated that subjects also appropriately employ base rates with general applicability, such as base rates that are indicators of the strength of a phenomenon. The results are suggestive of the considerable context-sensitivity of inferential judgments and of the need to study people's decision criteria and objectives as determinants of the strategies and information used in predictions.
A general survey of the metatheoretical perspectives arid theory-research areas that constitute the main history of U.S. social psychology reveals the individual to be at the center of the most widely engaging and influential schools and movements. Conversely, theories and research programs that have dealt generally with group or collective phenomena, employing interdependence or other "relational" concepts, have had a less continuous and long-term impact on the field. The individuocentric bias derives mainly from methodological doctrines associated with the concept of psychology as a natural empirical science. I conclude that theories based on intraindividual processes are inadequate to explain social behavior whose dynamic and structural sources lie in the three interdependent contexts of biology, physical ecology, and the sociocultural environment.
This article addresses a fundamental cause of the so-called "crisis" of social psychology-the misplaced theoretical unit of analysis. The argument begins with the observation that much of the social behavior that social psychologists attempt to explain is "normative," in being more characteristic of groups, classes, roles, and other sociocultural entities than of individuals observed at random. It is then assumed that the causes of normative behavior are dynamic properties of the same social system of which the behavior is distinctly characteristic-properties that may roughly be termed "values and beliefs." It is further argued that the major theories of social psychology consist of processes or dynamisms that are conceptually located within the individual. An analysis of game theory, equity, dissonance, aggression, and attitude theories illustrates their inadequacy as explanations for normative social behavior. Next discussed are the strong implications of this analysis for the reorientation of social psychology with respect to the types of scientific principles it seeks to establish, the design of comparative research for the description and causal analysis of value and belief systems, and the relationship of social psychology to the other social sciences and biology.
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