Social judgeability and the bogus pipeline: The role of naive theories of judgment in impression formation

Abstract

According to social judgeability theory, people rely on naive theories of judgment to make decisions about others. Because of limited access to their cognitive processes, perceivers use meta-informational cues to estimate the validity of their judgment and misattribute the origin of their impression. In line with this hypothesis, Yzerbyt, Schadron, Leyens, and Rocher (1994) found that participants who thought that they had subliminally received individuating information felt more entitled to judge and they made polarized judgments. Experiment 1 uses a bogus pipeline procedure to examine the viability of an impression management account of Yzerbyt et al.'s (1994) data, for example, that participants judged only because they thought that they were expected to judge regardless of their private beliefs. In line with a private belief interpretation, the bogus pipeline participants replicated previous results. Moreover, participants also stereotyped the target more in the presence than in the absence of the bogus pipeline, suggesting the existence of social desirability concerns in the expression of stereotypes. Experiment 2 tested perceivers' sensitivity to judgmental contexts by avoiding any reference to person perception. The results not only replicate the social judgeability pattern but additionally show that the absence of information made participants feel even less inclined to judge in a context that does not stress social judgment so much. As a set, these findings emphasize the role of naive theories in social inference processes, as suggested by social judgeability theory