When making a choice among objects or alternative courses of action, people often feel it is useful to seek out direct encounters with the objects or alternatives, even when these are costly. For example, people routinely interview job candidates and applicants for college and professional school. Conversely, people sometimes do not seek out or heavily weight reputational evidence, based on other people's views, even when these are readily obtainable. There is some empirical evidence, however, as well as a theoretical argument deriving from the Law of Large Numbers, indicating that one's personal samples of objects, particularly when these are based on only a small amount of evidence, may sometimes be poorly predictive of one's ultimate evaluations. Conversely, other people's samples, particularly if these are based on a large amount of evidence, may sometimes be highly predictive of one's evaluations. The proposed research will extend the available evidence on the question of predictability of one's ultimate evaluations of objects. It is anticipated that small personal samples of complex objects (e.g., interviews) will in general provide a relatively poor basis for evaluations, while reputational evidence about the objects, especially if based on a large number of people with a large amount of experience, will in general provide a relatively good basis for evaluations. People's beliefs about predictability of evaluations will also be studied. The anticipation is that people will in general overestimate the stability of their own small sample evaluations and underestimate the utility of other people's large sample evaluations. The exact nature of people's beliefs will be a guide as to how to educate people to make maximum use of evidence for effective social judgments and choices. The work is relevant to mental health in that it represents basic work on social cognition--that is, how people make use of evidence about complex social objects. It has direct relevance to the work of mental health professionals whose jobs consist in good part of making social judgments on the basis of evidence of varying kinds. The present work will speak to the utility of the kinds of evidence used by professionals.
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