According to a social judgeability analysis, a crucial determinant of impression formation is the extent to which people feel entitled to judge a target person. Two experiments tested the impact of the subjective availability of individuating information on a social judgment independent of its actual presence. In Experiment 1, people made a stereotypical judgment when they believed individuating information was present even if no information was in fact given. In Experiment 2, Ss who thought they received individuating information made more extreme and confident judgments than Ss who thought they received category information. This indicates that Ss' judgments were not simply a function of implicit demand: The illusion of receiving individuating information led Ss to believe they possessed the necessary evidence for legitimate decision making. This result supports the existence of rules in the social inference process.According to most social-cognitive accounts, an impression stems from a match between categorical and individuating information, or between theories about data and actual data. When forming an impression, perceivers have to consider the wealth of the categorical information as well as the rich concreteness of the individuating evidence (for a review, see Fiske & Taylor, 1991).Recent research on person perception shows that cognitive and motivational variables contribute to finding this optimal match. For instance, consideration of the base rates provided by the category (Ginossar & Trope, 1987), accessibility of alternative hypotheses (Kruglanski & Mayseless, 1988), and attention to inconsistent individuating information (Neuberg & Fiske, 1987) are cognitive factors that determine "adequate" impression formation. Also, accuracy goals (Kruglanski, 1989(Kruglanski, , 1990,

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Social judgeability theory holds that people rely on naive theories when forming impressions. One rule is that perceivers should not judge others on the sole basis of their stereotypes. They may, however, misattribute a category-based impression to the target information and fall prey to the illusion of being informed provided individuating evidence is present and the stereotype is not made salient. The authors suggest that such a misattribution process contributes to the dilution of stereotypes. Subjects rated a member of a stereotyped group either after or both before and after reception of target information. The authors predicted that pseudorelevant information (i.e., information nondiagnostic for the specific judgment but diagnostic for many others) but not irrelevant information would lead to a stereotypical single judgment and dilute an initial stereotyped evaluation. Results confirmed the hypotheses and stress the role of implicit rules in social inference.