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Chapter 16 - Heuristic Social Sampling

from Part V - Sampling as a Tool in Social Environments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2023

By
Thorsten Pachur  and
Christin Schulze
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
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Summary

A person’s social network constitutes a rich sampling space for informing judgments about social statistics (e.g., the distribution of preferences, risks, or behaviors in the broader social environment). How is this sampling space searched and used to make inferences? This chapter gives an overview on research on the social-circle model, a computational process account of how people make inferences about relative event frequencies. The social-circle model is inspired by the notion of sequential and limited search in models of bounded rationality for multi-attribute decision making. In accord with research on the structure of social memory, the model assumes that social sampling proceeds by sequentially probing a person’s social circles – including oneself, family, friends, and acquaintances – and that search is constrained by a simple stopping rule. The social-circle model has several free parameters that enable it to capture individual differences in the order in which social circles are inspected, in noise during evidence evaluation, and in discrimination thresholds. We provide a step-by-step tutorial for deriving predictions of the social-circle model, review empirical tests of the model, illustrate how the model reflects individual differences in social sampling and differences in sampling across domains, and analyze the ecological rationality of heuristic social sampling.

Keywords

social samplinginformation searchfrequency judgmentsocial circlesbounded rationalityheuristiccomputational modeling
Type
Chapter
Information
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making , pp. 359 - 384
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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