I just noticed a study that might be relevant here cited in a classic Social psychology book I was reading (Baron, Byrne). The article they refer to is Graziano et al. “Social influence, sex differences, and judgments of beauty : putting the Interpersonal back in interpersonal attraction”, 1993 and the result relevant here is that when women are shown an assessment of a man by some other woman, their own assesment moves towards it. This would make the result discussed here just a corollary of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do not have time to read either of the articles at the moment but it would probably do some good if someone looked over the Graziano paper and verified whether or not it is relevant?
The paper says:
“Ironically, 75% of the women believed that simulation information would have allowed them to make a more accurate forecast about their date with the man they met, and 84% believed that simulation information would allow them to make a more accurate forecast about a future date with a different man.”
It doesn’t say when women were asked this question. So the crucial information is missing.
The experimenters misunderstood their own experiment. They dutifully reported the manner in which the “data” was gathered, but failed to realize that the reported confidence of the subjects in the two types of information was actually the critical data.
In the second experiment, the experimenters also did the wrong thing: They asked judges which type of information would be more useful to them, descriptions of the 3 personality types, or reports written by people describing their responses. The article does not say that the judges were shown the descriptions of the 3 personality types. Thus, again, we can suppose that the judges decided that knowing the 3 personality types would be more useful was based on an erroneous supposition that the descriptions would contain more information than they actually did.
Also, the experimenters used a separate group of subjects to rate whether experiential or “simulation” information would be more valuable to them, than the group of subjects that they used to determine which type of information was more valuable. Why? They increased the expense of their study by 50% in order to make it less convincing. This makes no sense to me.
The original paper is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5921/1617
I just noticed a study that might be relevant here cited in a classic Social psychology book I was reading (Baron, Byrne). The article they refer to is Graziano et al. “Social influence, sex differences, and judgments of beauty : putting the Interpersonal back in interpersonal attraction”, 1993 and the result relevant here is that when women are shown an assessment of a man by some other woman, their own assesment moves towards it. This would make the result discussed here just a corollary of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do not have time to read either of the articles at the moment but it would probably do some good if someone looked over the Graziano paper and verified whether or not it is relevant?
Thanks much!
The paper says: “Ironically, 75% of the women believed that simulation information would have allowed them to make a more accurate forecast about their date with the man they met, and 84% believed that simulation information would allow them to make a more accurate forecast about a future date with a different man.”
It doesn’t say when women were asked this question. So the crucial information is missing.
The experimenters misunderstood their own experiment. They dutifully reported the manner in which the “data” was gathered, but failed to realize that the reported confidence of the subjects in the two types of information was actually the critical data.
In the second experiment, the experimenters also did the wrong thing: They asked judges which type of information would be more useful to them, descriptions of the 3 personality types, or reports written by people describing their responses. The article does not say that the judges were shown the descriptions of the 3 personality types. Thus, again, we can suppose that the judges decided that knowing the 3 personality types would be more useful was based on an erroneous supposition that the descriptions would contain more information than they actually did.
Also, the experimenters used a separate group of subjects to rate whether experiential or “simulation” information would be more valuable to them, than the group of subjects that they used to determine which type of information was more valuable. Why? They increased the expense of their study by 50% in order to make it less convincing. This makes no sense to me.
So this study is intriguing, but not convincing.