Effects of the social interaction context on social judgeability

Abstract

The social judgeability model states that in order to give a social judgement, people need to feel that they are in a position to judge. To give a social judgement is not only a question of integrating individual and categorical information about the target. It also depends upon the relationship between the judges and their judgements. Within the pragmatic context surrounding any social judgement, perceivers have to consider its social validity following their theories about that relation. Some factors may increase this sense of social validity. According to the social judgeability model, having status may induce people to assume they have sufficient information to make a social judgement. An experiment was conducted to test this hypothesis, manipulating the position status of the judges: higher, equal or lower that the alvo. Two groups of students have participated in this study (first group N=63, second group N=60). Results show that subjects with higher position status reported greater confidence in their judgements relatively to other subjects. These results are discussed within the framework of impression formation and social judgeability.