Contribution of conversation skills to the production of judgmental errors

Abstract

An impressive body of evidence has accumulated demonstrating that many of the judgmental ‘errors’ or ‘biases’ formerly thought due to purely cognitive shortcomings actually reflect the operation of communication goals and strategies that people rely upon to comprehend and generate meaningful conversation. This study examines the effects of individual differences in conversational skills on the production of biased responses using six judgmental heuristics tasks: base-rate error, conjunction error, dilution effect, underuse of consensus information, primacy effect, and confirmation bias. Clarke's (1975) ‘method of reconstruction’ was used to obtain two measures of conversational sophistication: relevance-seeking and (un)responsiveness. A path analysis predicting biased judgments from the skill variables demonstrates that a combination of these variables, which we term ‘Pragmatic Competence’, is predictive of two independent subsets of the heuristics tasks. Our model provides convergent evidence with other, parametric studies for the proposition that biased social judgments are, at least in part, artifacts of participants' reasonable (and unreasonable!) expectations concerning experimenter cooperativeness. ‘The process of forming an integrated mental model of premises is nothing more than the proper comprehension of discourse: it is required in order to grasp the full impact of what the speaker has to say’ Johnson-Laird (1983, p. 119). © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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