Cognition and Communication: Judgmental Biases, Research Methods, and the Logic of Conversation

by Norbert Schwarz

Psychological research into human cognition and judgment reveals a wide range of biases and shortcomings. Whether we form impressions of other people, recall episodes from memory, report our attitudes in an opinion poll, or make important decisions, we often get it wrong. The errors made are not trivial and often seem to violate common sense and basic logic. A closer look at the underlying processes, however, suggests that many of the well known fallacies do not necessarily reflect inherent shortcomings of human judgment. Rather, they partially reflect that research participants bring the tacit assumptions that govern the conduct of conversation in daily life to the research situation. According to these assumptions, communicated information comes with a guarantee of relevance and listeners are entitled to assume that the speaker tries to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. Moreover, listeners interpret the speakers' utterances on the assumption that they are trying to live up to these ideals.

This book introduces social science researchers to the "logic of conversation" developed by Paul Grice, a philosopher of language, who proposed the cooperative principle and a set of maxims on which conversationalists implicitly rely. The author applies this framework to a wide range of topics, including research on person perception, decision making, and the emergence of context effects in attitude measurement and public opinion research. Experimental studies reveal that the biases generally seen in such research are, in part, a function of violations of Gricean conversational norms. The author discusses implications for the design of experiments and questionnaires and addresses the socially contextualized nature of human judgment.

124 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1996

Reviews

[Nat]

Schwarz ingeniously argues that many forms of judgmental bias usually chalked up to human cognitive shortcomings can be explained as systematic distortions in experimental results generated by totally rational attempts to find meaning in experimental prompts and surveys. So, for example, Piaget argued that young children do not master number conservation on the basis of asking kids, of two rows of objects equal in number and aligned in 1-1 correspondence, "Is there more here or more here, or are both the same number?" Kids typically answer that both rows have the same number of objects. Then the experimenter rearranges one of the two rows to make it longer, without changing the number of objects. The same question is then repeated: "Is there more here or more here, or are both the same number?" Many kids change their answer, saying that there is more in the second (longer) row of objects. Schwarz discusses an alternative explanation of this result, which goes as follows:

1. There is a conversational norm against repeating the same question in the same conversation.
2. The experimenter repeats the same question to the experimental subjects, in violation of the norm.
3. Violations of conversational norms trigger attempts to make sense of the violation (possibly in accordance with Gricean maxims).
4. The kids are plausibly interpreting the experimenter's second question to be about the length of the two rows, not the number of objects they contain.

And Schwarz cites an experiment that evaluates this account by modifying the Piaget task by introducing an agent ("a naughty teddy bear") that rearranges the rows, making the second request for the number of objects an intelligible request (since it's no longer obvious that the rows contain the same number of objects in the teddy bear context). In the modified experiment, far more kids demonstrated an ability to keep track of the number of objects in the rows.

Before you try to design an experiment (whether a thought experiment or a real one) you need to think about all kinds of surprising features of the way the experiment is set up.

The whole book is an excellent example of applied philosophy of language.