COGNITION AND COMMUNICATION: JUDGMENTAL BIASES, RESEARCHMETHODS, AND THE LOGIC OF CONVERSATION.Norbert Schwarz.Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996. Pp. vii + 112. $22.50 paper.

Abstract

Professor Schwarz is the most recent contributor to the John M. MacEachran Memorial Lecture Series. In this timely essay, Schwarz takes a position critical of traditional psychological research asserting that: “Our [psychologists'] focus on individual thought processes has fostered a neglect of the social context in which individuals do their thinking and this neglect has contributed to the less than flattering portrait that psychology has painted of human judgment” (p. 1). He posits that “fallacies of human judgment” reported in studies of cognition and communication are actually fallacies of the research—specifically, the researchers' failure to take into account the human mind's capacity to make sense of things, particularly through communication embedded in social context. His point is an important one. When involved in conversation (even in the research laboratory), humans may suspend their abstract knowledge of the logic of language and attend to irrelevant and misleading information—especially if they assume that the speaker's intentions are to convey information and to make sense. Schwarz reports that “ordinary kinds of talk” build on Gricean conversational implicatures, inferences that “go beyond the semantic meaning of what is being said by determining the pragmatic meaning of the utterance” (p. 11). Researchers underestimate the power of these inferences and, by presenting decontextualized, at times absurd, information, they fail to accurately measure their subjects' “human judgment,” but instead observe their subjects' diligent, and often expert, attempts to make sense of the message.