CONTRIBUTION OF CONVERSATION SKILLS TO THE PRODUCTION OF JUDGMENTAL ERRORS

An impressive body of evidence has accumulated demonstrating that many of the judgmental 'errors' or 'biases' formerly thought due to purely cognitive shortcomings actually reflect the operation of communicatio n goals and strategies that people rely upon to comprehend and generat e meaningful conversation. This study examines the effects of individu al differences in conversational skills on the production of biased re sponses using six judgmental heuristics tasks, base-rate error, conjun ction error, dilution effect, underuse of consensus information, prima ry effect, and confirmation bias. Clarke's (1975) 'method of reconstru ction' was used to obtain two, measures of conversational sophisticati on.. relevance-seeking and (un)responsiveness. A path analysis predict ing biased judgments from the skill variables demonstrates that a comb ination of these variables, which we term 'Pragmatic Competence', is p redictive of two independent subsets of the heuristics tasks. Our mode l provides convergent evidence with other, parametric studies for the proposition that biased social judgements are, at least in part, artif acts of participants' reasonable (and unreasonable!) expectations conc erning experimenter cooperativeness. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.