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Seeing Social Structure: Assessing the Accuracy of Interpersonal Judgments about Social Networks.
Seeing Social Structure: Assessing the Accuracy of Interpersonal Judgments about Social Networks.
- Source :
- Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings; 2016, Vol. 2016 Issue 1, p1-1, 1p
- Publication Year :
- 2016
-
Abstract
- Sociological research has long recognized that, even in brief or routine interactions, people constantly make judgments about others' social worlds and that these inferences can have material consequences in contexts as diverse as hiring, venture capital funding, and courtship encounters. Yet it remains unclear whether people are accurate in making these interpersonal judgments and, if so, how far they can "see" into the social structure that surrounds unfamiliar others. In this paper, we draw on the "thin slice" paradigm from social psychology to examine the question: How accurate are the inferences that people draw about the social networks of unfamiliar others whom they observe only fleetingly? Our data set includes over 2,100 interpersonal judgments made by 375 people about the social networks of 23 target individuals. Remarkably, we find that people are accurate in their judgments of unknown others' proximate social structure--that is, the size and composition of targets' reported contacts. They do not, however, make accurate judgments of the distal social structure surrounding unfamiliar other --that is, the nature of connections among targets' reported contacts. We also find that, when people make errors in such judgments, they tend to do so in ways that are consistent with gender stereotypes. We conclude with a discussion of this work's implications for research on the interpenetration of cognition and social structure and on the antecedents of gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 21516561
- Volume :
- 2016
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings
- Publication Type :
- Conference
- Accession number :
- 119237570
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2016.15679abstract