Accuracy, bias, self-fulfilling prophecies, and scientific self-correction

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Jussim
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Person Perception ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Expectancy Effects ◽  
The Social

AbstractIn my Précis of Social Perception and Social Reality (Jussim 2012, henceforth abbreviated as SPSR), I argued that the social science scholarship on social perception and interpersonal expectancies was characterized by a tripartite pattern: (1) Errors, biases, and self-fulfilling prophecies in person perception were generally weak, fragile, and fleeting; (2) Social perceptions were often quite accurate; and (3) Conclusions appearing throughout the social psychology scientific literature routinely overstated the power and pervasiveness of expectancy effects, and ignored evidence of accuracy. Most commentators concurred with the validity of these conclusions. Two, however, strongly disagreed with the conclusion that the evidence consistently has shown that stereotypes are moderately to highly accurate. Several others, while agreeing with most of the specifics, also suggested that those arguments did not necessarily apply to contexts outside of those covered in SPSR. In this response, I consider all these aspects: the limitations to the tripartite pattern, the role of politics and confirmation biases in distorting scientific conclusions, common obstructions to effective scientific self-correction, and how to limit them.

Précis of Social Perception and Social Reality: Why accuracy dominates bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Jussim
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Person Perception ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
High Accuracy ◽  
Expectancy Effects ◽  
Social Stereotypes ◽  
Error Bias ◽  
Meta Analyses

AbstractSocial Perception and Social Reality (Jussim 2012) reviews the evidence in social psychology and related fields and reaches three conclusions: (1) Although errors, biases, and self-fulfilling prophecies in person perception are real, reliable, and occasionally quite powerful, on average, they tend to be weak, fragile, and fleeting. (2) Perceptions of individuals and groups tend to be at least moderately, and often highly accurate. (3) Conclusions based on the research on error, bias, and self-fulfilling prophecies routinely greatly overstate their power and pervasiveness, and consistently ignore evidence of accuracy, agreement, and rationality in social perception. The weight of the evidence – including some of the most classic research widely interpreted as testifying to the power of biased and self-fulfilling processes – is that interpersonal expectations relate to social reality primarily because they reflect rather than cause social reality. This is the case not only for teacher expectations, but also for social stereotypes, both as perceptions of groups, and as the bases of expectations regarding individuals. The time is long overdue to replace cherry-picked and unjustified stories emphasizing error, bias, the power of self-fulfilling prophecies, and the inaccuracy of stereotypes, with conclusions that more closely correspond to the full range of empirical findings, which includes multiple failed replications of classic expectancy studies, meta-analyses consistently demonstrating small or at best moderate expectancy effects, and high accuracy in social perception.

scholarly journals Doing things with description: practices, politics, and the art of attentiveness

2020 ◽  
pp. 146879412097597
Author(s):  
Nicole Vitellone ◽  
Michael Mair ◽  
Ciara Kierans
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
The Social

In a number of linked articles and monographs over the last decade (e.g. Love, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017), literary scholar and critic Heather Love has called for a descriptive (re)turn in the humanities, repeatedly taking up examples of descriptive methods in the social sciences as exemplifying what that (re)turn might look like and achieve. Those of us working as sociologists, anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars and researchers in allied social science fields thus find ourselves reflected back in Love’s work, encountering our own research practices in an unfamiliar light through it. In a period where our established methods and analytical priorities are subject to challenges on many fronts from within our own disciplines, it is hard not be struck by Love’s provocative invocation of the social sciences as interlocutors and see in it an invitation to contribute to the debate she has sought to initiate by revisiting our own approaches to the problem of description. Inspired by Love’s intervention, the eight papers that form this Special Issue demonstrate that by re-engaging with description we stand to learn a great deal. While the articles themselves are topically distinct and geographically varied, they are all based on empirical research and written to facilitate a reorientation to the role of description in our research practices. What exactly is going on when we describe an ancient papyrus as present or missing, a machine as intelligent, noise as music, a disease as undiagnosable, a death as good or bad, deserved or undeserved, care as appropriate or inappropriate, policies as failing or effective? As the papers show, these are important questions to ask. By asking them, we find ourselves in positions to better understand what goes into ‘indexing and making visible forms of material and social reality’ (Love, 2013: 412) as well as what is involved, more troublingly, in erasing, making invisible and dematerialising those realities or even, indeed, in uncovering those erasures and the means by which they were effected. As this special issue underlines, thinking with Love by thinking with descriptions is a rewarding exercise precisely because it opens these matters up to view. We hope others take up Love’s invitation to re-engage with description for that very reason.

scholarly journals The social perception of monastic life between falsity and reality in contemporary world

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 514-525
Author(s):  
Nina Stănescu
Keyword(s):  
Social Perception ◽  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Small Circle ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Monastic Life

Analysis of the misled mundane perceptions of monasteries and monastic life, and finding ways to change this concepts to the appropriate social reality in order to improve relations between the mundane and the monastic population, and also to increase the role of monasteries in moral and spiritual development of adolescents and youth. The key to this problem is communion, meaning together-living, together-working and together-thinking. The great revelation of Christianity was and is that the community comes first, either the big or the small communtiy. Great empires have induced the illusion that the great things, the secrets and the keys to our lives they are somewhere above or outside the small circle of our lives.

Social Ontology and Model-Building: A Response to Epstein

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Nadia Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Model Construction ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social

Brian Epstein has recently argued that a thoroughly microfoundationalist approach towards economics is unconvincing for metaphysical reasons. Generally, Epstein argues that for an improvement in the methodology of social science we must adopt social ontology as the foundation of social sciences; that is, the standing microfoundationalist debate could be solved by fixing economics’ ontology. However, as I show in this paper, fixing the social ontology prior to the process of model construction is optional instead of necessary and that metaphysical-ontological commitments are often the outcome of model construction, not its starting point. By focusing on the practice of modeling in economics the paper provides a useful inroad into the debate about the role of metaphysics in the natural and social sciences more generally.

Los estereotipos sociales a través del filtro de la traducción

Babel ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-233
Author(s):  
Gemma Andújar Moreno
Keyword(s):  
Social Representations ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Social Stereotypes ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Thought Patterns ◽  
Points Of View

Cultural referents not only designate specific realities of a given culture which do not always exist in another but they are also semantic elements which trigger social representations. By conveying values and points of view about different social groups, cultural referents become linguistic instruments to build stereotypes. These thought patterns are shared by the members of a social or cultural community and act as a filter of reality. The aim of this paper is to study the role of cultural referents in the construction of social stereotypes, focusing on the socio-cognitive universe they evoke. To this end, we have analyzed the translations techniques applied in the Spanish, Catalan and English versions of a novel which has been very successful on the French literary scene: Muriel Barbery’s L’Élégance du hérisson (2006). As show the results of this textual comparison, the explanations, descriptions and additional information observed in target texts do not trigger the same associations as cultural referents do in the source text. Translational approaches are too limited when it comes to achieve linguistic adequacy to different world visions. Therefore, translation must be conceived as an encounter between two cultural systems, in which the translator must build bridges, not so much between two linguistic systems as between the social perceptions and values of two different cultural communities.

scholarly journals The role of the group type and the characteristics of self-attitude in students’ social perception

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
M.V. Baleva
Keyword(s):  
Social Perception ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Group Type ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Mediating Factor ◽  
Self Acceptance ◽  
Ingroup Favoritism

The article deals with the problem of disparate studies in social perceptions of different types of groups, which impede the understanding of its fundamental mechanisms. Different types of social groups appear in the research as stimulus descriptions of their artificial analogues, singled out according to ethnic, ideological and stratification criteria. As a mediating factor of social perception, the features of subject’s self-attitude (self-acceptance and self-rejection) are considered. The study involved 307 females and 109 males from 17 to 22 years old (M = 18.92, SD = 0.93). It was found that perceiving of different types of social groups determines the varying degrees of stereotyping and bias intensity. Both of these phenomena are most observable for the groups identified by stratification criterion. Ingroup favoritism is also more conspicuous for the subject’s “ideological” ingroup in comparison with the groups of different types. It was also shown that self-attitude plays a facilitating role in the manifestations of ingroup favoritism: both self-acceptance and self-rejection contribute to the growth of perceptional bias, but do not “participate” in outgroup stereotyping.

scholarly journals Erasing the Social from Social Science: The Intellectual Costs of Boundary-Work and the Canadian Institute of Health Research

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katelin E. Albert
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Research Funding ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Canadian Institute ◽  
The Social

In 2009, Canadian social science research funding underwent a transition. Social science health-research was shifted from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), an agency previously dominated by natural and medical science. This paper examines the role of health-research funding structures in legitimizing and/or delimiting what counts as ‘good’ social science health research. Engaging Gieryn’s (1983) notion of ‘boundary-work’ and interviews with qualitative social science graduate students, it investigates how applicants developed proposals for CIHR. Findings show that despite claiming to be interdisciplinary, the practical mechanisms through which CIHR funding is distributed reinforce rigid boundaries of what counts as legitimate health research. These boundaries are reinforced by applicants who felt pressure to prioritize what they perceived was what funders wanted (accommodating natural-science research culture), resulting in erased, elided, and disguised social science theories and methods common for ‘good social science.’

The Construction of the Social Reality From the News Narrative to Transmedia Storytelling

2019 ◽  
pp. 487-508
Author(s):  
Beste Nigar Erdem
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Frame

The present study discusses how a masculine violence is presented in the news narrative in Turkey. Moreover, this study aims to analyze how the mental designs are reflected to the multimedia platforms and how it constitutes the social interactions and reflexes. Fundamentally, this study queries how the social reality area is reconstructed. Constructing the theoretical frame and the literature review of the masculine violence are the major concerns of this study. Additionally, the role of the news narrative in the construction of the social reality and the representation of the news of masculine violence are examined in this study. Finally, a case of masculine violence in Turkey has been examined in the social production context of the transmedia storytelling.

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