SOCIAL JUDGEABILITY AND THE BOGUS PIPELINE - THE ROLE OF NAIVE THEORIES OF JUDGMENT IN IMPRESSION-FORMATION

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 th ey had subliminally received individuating information felt more entit led to judge and they made polarized judgments. Experiment 1 uses a bo gus pipeline procedure to examine the viability of an impression manag ement account of Yzerbyt et al.'s (1994) data, for example, that parti cipants judged only because they thought that they were expected to ju dge regardless of their private beliefs. In line with a private belief interpretation, the bogus pipeline participants replicated previous r esults. Moreover, participants also stereotyped the target more in the presence than in the absence of the bogus pipeline, suggesting the ex istence of social desirability concerns in the expression of stereotyp es. 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 t he 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 in ference processes, as suggested by social judgeability theory.