Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:20:34.021Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 10 - Evaluative Consequences of Sampling Distinct Information

from Part III - Consequences of Selective Sampling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2023

By
Hans Alves ,
Alex Koch  and
Christian Unkelbach
Edited by
Klaus Fiedler ,
Peter Juslin  and
Jerker Denrell
Klaus Fiedler
Affiliation:
Universität Heidelberg
Peter Juslin
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
Jerker Denrell
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Get access

Summary

People’s impressions, attitudes, and judgments necessarily rely on samples of information. We introduce a sampling principle according to which people seek distinct information that is rare and diverse, and that allows to differentiate between contexts, objects, people, or groups. Among distinct information samples, however, negative information is overrepresented. This follows because in most information ecologies, negative compared to positive information is less frequent, but more diverse. Consequently, when perceivers sample distinct information, resulting impressions, attitudes, and judgments will be negatively biased.

Keywords

valenceattitudessamplingdistinctivenessbiases
Type
Chapter
Information
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making , pp. 222 - 244
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alicke, M. D., & Govorun, O. (2005). The better-than-average effect. The Self in Social Judgment, 1, 85–106.Google Scholar
Alves, H. (2018). Sharing rare attitudes attracts. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44, 1270–1283.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alves, H., Högden, F., Gast, A., Aust, F., & Unkelbach, C. (2020). Attitudes from mere co-occurrences are guided by differentiation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119, 560.Google Scholar
Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2016). My friends are all alike: The relation between liking and perceived similarity in person perception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 62, 103–117.Google Scholar
Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017a). The “common good” phenomenon: Why similarities are positive and differences are negative. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146, 512.Google Scholar
Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017b). Why good is more alike than bad: Processing implications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 69–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2018a). A cognitive-ecological explanation of intergroup biases. Psychological Science, 29, 1126–1133.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2018b). The differential similarity of positive and negative information: An affect-induced processing outcome? Cognition and Emotion, 33, 1224–1238.Google Scholar
Alves, H., Uğurlar, P., & Unkelbach, C. (2022). Typical is trustworthy: Evidence for a generalized heuristic. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13(2), 446–455.Google Scholar
Alves, H., Unkelbach, C., Burghardt, J., Koch, A. S., Krüger, T., & Becker, V. D. (2015). A density explanation of valence asymmetries in recognition memory. Memory & Cognition, 43, 896–909.Google Scholar
Anderson, N. H. (1981). Foundations of information integration theory. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Aristotle (1999 trans.) Nicomachean ethics (Ross, W. D., trans.). Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books.Google Scholar
Augustine, A. A., Mehl, M. R., & Larsen, R. J. (2011). A positivity bias in written and spoken English and its moderation by personality and gender. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 508–515.Google Scholar
Bednarek, M. (2008). Emotion talk across corpora. Heidelberg: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2017). The discourse of news values: How news organizations create newsworthiness. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 84–85.Google Scholar
Bornstein, R. F., & D’Agostino, P. R. (1992). Stimulus recognition and the mere exposure effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 545.Google Scholar
Boucher, J., & Osgood, C. E. (1969). The Pollyanna hypothesis. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 8, 1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, N. T., Miller, J. D., & Widiger, T. A. (2018). Extreme personalities at work and in life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27, 429–436.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A., Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2010). Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications. Cognitive Science, 34, 1452–1482.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H., & Clark, E. V. (1977). Psychology and language: An introduction to psycholinguistics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
De Bruin, W. B., & Keren, G. (2003). Order effects in sequentially judged options due to the direction of comparison. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 92, 91–101.Google Scholar
Denrell, J. (2005). Why most people disapprove of me: Experience sampling in impression formation. Psychological Review, 112, 951.Google Scholar
Denrell, J. (2007). Adaptive learning and risk taking. Psychological Review, 114, 177.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Denrell, J., & Le Mens, G. (2011). Seeking positive experiences can produce illusory correlations. Cognition, 119, 313–324.Google Scholar
Denrell, J., & March, J. G. (2001). Adaptation as information restriction: The hot stove effect. Organization Science, 12, 523–538.Google Scholar
Diener, E., & Diener, C. (1996). Most people are happy. Psychological Science, 7, 181–185.Google Scholar
Dodds, P. S., Clark, E. M., & Desu, S., et al. (2015). Human language reveals a universal positivity bias. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 2389–2394.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17, 124.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Engelhardt, P. E., Bailey, K. G., & Ferreira, F. (2006). Do speakers and listeners observe the Gricean maxim of quantity? Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 554–573.Google Scholar
Fazio, R. H., Eiser, J. R., & Shook, N. J. (2004). Attitude formation through exploration: Valence asymmetries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 293.Google Scholar
Fernandez, R., & Rodrik, D. (1991). Resistance to reform: Status quo bias in the presence of individual-specific uncertainty. American Economic Review, 81, 1146–1155.Google Scholar
Fiske, S. T. (1980). Attention and weight in person perception: The impact of negative and extreme behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 889.Google Scholar
Florack, A., Koch, T., Haasova, S., Kunz, S., & Alves, H. (2021). The differentiation principle: Why consumers often neglect positive attributes of novel food products. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 31, 684–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galtung, J., & Ruge, M. H. (1965). The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2, 64–90.Google Scholar
Garner, W. R. (1974). The processing of information and structure. Potomac, MD: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gershoff, A. D., Mukherjee, A., & Mukhopadhyay, A. (2007). Few ways to love, but many ways to hate: Attribute ambiguity and the positivity effect in agent evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 499–505.Google Scholar
Gilbert, G. M. (1951). Stereotype persistence and change among college students. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46, 245.Google Scholar
Govorun, O. (2005). The better-than-average effect. In Alicke, M. D., Dunning, D. A., & Krueger, J. I. (Eds.), The self in social judgment (pp. 85–106). London: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Grant, A. M., & Schwartz, B. (2011). Too much of a good thing: The challenge and opportunity of the inverted U. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 61–76.Google Scholar
Greenberg, M. S., Saxe, L., & Bar-Tal, D. (1978). Perceived stability of trait labels. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4, 59–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P., & Morgan, J. L. (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3, Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hewstone, M., Rubin, M., & Willis, H. (2002). Intergroup bias. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 575–604.Google Scholar
Hodges, S. D. (1997). When matching up features messes up decisions: The role of feature matching in successive choices. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1310.Google Scholar
Hodges, S. D. (2005). A feature-based model of self–other comparisons. In Alicke, M. D., Dunning, D. A., & Krueger, J. I. (Eds.), The Self in Social Judgment (pp. 131–153). London: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Hoorens, V. (1993). Self-enhancement and superiority biases in social comparison. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, 113–139.Google Scholar
Houston, D. A., & Sherman, S. J. (1995). Cancellation and focus: The role of shared and unique features in the choice process. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 357–378.Google Scholar
Houston, D. A., Sherman, S. J., & Baker, S. M. (1989). The influence of unique features and direction of comparison of preferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 121–141.Google Scholar
Houston, D. A., Sherman, S. J., & Baker, S. M. (1991). Feature matching, unique features, and the dynamics of the choice process: Predecision conflict and postdecision satisfaction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 27, 411–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imhoff, R., & Koch, A. (2017). How orthogonal are the Big Two of social perception? On the curvilinear relationship between agency and communion. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 122–137.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1991). Anomalies: The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5, 193–206.Google Scholar
Kamin, L. J. (1969). Predictability, surprise, attention and conditioning. In Campbell, B. & Church, R. (Eds.), Punishment and aversive behavior (pp. 279–296). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Google Scholar
Karlins, M., Coffman, T. L., & Walters, G. (1969). On the fading of social stereotypes: Studies in three generations of college students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 1.Google Scholar
Katz, D., & Braly, K. W. (1935). Racial prejudice and racial stereotypes. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 30, 175.Google Scholar
Koch, A., Alves, H., Krüger, T., & Unkelbach, C. (2016). A general valence asymmetry in similarity: Good is more alike than bad. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 1171.Google Scholar
Koch, A., Dorrough, A., Glöckner, A., & Imhoff, R. (2020). The ABC of society: Similarity in agency and beliefs predicts cooperation across groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 90, 103996.Google Scholar
Koch, A., Imhoff, R., Dotsch, R., Unkelbach, C., & Alves, H. (2016). The ABC of stereotypes about groups: Agency/socioeconomic success, conservative–progressive beliefs, and communion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110, 675.Google Scholar
Koch, A., Imhoff, R., Unkelbach, C., et al. (2020). Groups’ warmth is a personal matter: Understanding consensus on stereotype dimensions reconciles adversarial models of social evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 89, 103995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kovacs, B., & Hannan, M. T. (2010). The effects of category spanning depend on contrast. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 31, 175–201.Google Scholar
Krueger, J., & Clement, R. W. (1994). Memory-based judgments about multiple categories: A revision and extension of Tajfel’s accentuation theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 35.Google Scholar
Krueger, J., Rothbart, M., & Sriram, N. (1989). Category learning and change: Differences in sensitivity to information that enhances or reduces intercategory distinctions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 866.Google Scholar
Kruschke, J. K. (2001). Toward a unified model of attention in associative learning. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 45, 812–863.Google Scholar
Kruschke, J. K. (2003). Attention in learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 171–175.Google Scholar
Langlois, J. H., & Roggman, L. A. (1990). Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1, 115–121.Google Scholar
Leising, D., Ostrovski, O., & Borkenau, P. (2012). Vocabulary for describing disliked persons is more differentiated than vocabulary for describing liked persons. Journal of Research in Personality, 46, 393–396.Google Scholar
Leslie, S. J. (2017). The original sin of cognition: Fear, prejudice, and generalization. Journal of Philosophy, 114, 393–421.Google Scholar
Leslie, S. J., Khemlani, S., & Glucksberg, S. (2011). Do all ducks lay eggs? The generic overgeneralization effect. Journal of Memory and Language, 65, 15–31.Google Scholar
Mackintosh, N. J. (1975). A theory of attention: Variations in the associability of stimuli with reinforcement. Psychological Review, 82, 276.Google Scholar
Mackintosh, N. J. (1976). Overshadowing and stimulus intensity. Animal Learning & Behavior, 4, 186–192.Google Scholar
March, J. G. (1996). Learning to be risk averse. Psychological Review, 103, 309.Google Scholar
Ortony, A., & Turner, T. J. (1990). What’s basic about basic emotions? Psychological Review, 97, 315.Google Scholar
Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes: An investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perlman, D., & Oskamp, S. (1971). The effects of picture content and exposure frequency on evaluations of negroes and whites. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 7, 503–514.Google Scholar
Potter, T., & Corneille, O. (2008). Locating attractiveness in the face space: Faces are more attractive when closer to their group prototype. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 615–622.Google Scholar
Rescorla, R. A., & Wagner, A. R. (1972). A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In Black, A. H. & Prokasy, W. F. (Eds.), Classical conditioning II (pp. 64–99). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Google Scholar
Ric, F., Alexopoulos, T., Muller, D., & Aubé, B. (2013). Emotional norms for 524 French personality trait words. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 414–421.Google Scholar
Rosch, E., & Lloyd, B. B. (Eds.). (1978). Cognition and categorization. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rothbart, M., & Park, B. (1986). On the confirmability and disconfirmability of trait concepts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 131.Google Scholar
Rubio‐Fernandez, P. (2019). Overinformative speakers are cooperative: Revisiting the Gricean maxim of quantity. Cognitive Science, 43, e12797.Google Scholar
Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1, 7–59.Google Scholar
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., & Gibson, B. D. (1991). The role of attribute knowledge and overall evaluations in comparative judgment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 48, 131–146.Google Scholar
Savage, L. J. (1954; 2nd ed. 1972). The foundations of statistics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley; New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Schrauf, R. W., & Sanchez, J. (2004). The preponderance of negative emotion words in the emotion lexicon: A cross-generational and cross-linguistic study. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25, 266–284.Google Scholar
Sears, D. O. (1983). The person-positivity bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Semin, G. R., & Fiedler, K. (1992). Language, interaction and social cognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Sherman, S. J., Houston, D. A., & Eddy, D. (1999). Cancellation and focus: A feature-matching model of choice. European Review of Social Psychology, 10, 169–197.Google Scholar
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193.Google Scholar
Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Psychological Review: Monograph Supplements, 2, i.Google Scholar
Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327.Google Scholar
Unkelbach, C., Alves, H., & Koch, A. (2020). Negativity bias, positivity bias, and valence asymmetries: Explaining the differential processing of positive and negative information. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 62, 115–187.Google Scholar
Unkelbach, C., & Fiedler, K. (2016). Contrastive CS–US relations reverse evaluative conditioning effects. Social Cognition, 34, 413–434.Google Scholar
Unkelbach, C., Koch, A., & Alves, H. (2019). The evaluative information ecology: On the frequency and diversity of “good” and “bad.” European Review of Social Psychology, 30, 216–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1947). Theory of games and economic behavior (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Winkielman, P., Halberstadt, J., Fazendeiro, T., & Catty, S. (2006). Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind. Psychological Science, 17, 799–806.Google Scholar
Wyer, R. S. (1974). Cognitive organization and change: An information-processing approach. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 1–27.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×