We analyze how people form evaluative judgments about categories based on their experiences with category members. Prior research suggests that such evaluative judgments depend on some experience average but is unclear about the specific kind of average. We hypothesized that evaluations of categories could be driven either by the simple average of experiences with the category or by the member average (the average of the evaluations of the category members, where the evaluation of a category member is the average of experiences with this particular member). Understanding whether evaluations of categories are driven by the simple average or the member average is important in settings where people obtain unbalanced numbers of observations about category members such as when people form opinions about a social group and predominantly interact with just a few members of this group. Across nine studies (N = 1,966), we consistently found that evaluative judgments about categories were better explained by the simple average than by the member average. We call the underlying cognitive strategy the simple averaging heuristic. Collected evidence indicates that participants relied on simple averaging even in settings where normative principles required avoiding the use of this cognitive strategy, leading to systematic mistakes. Our findings contribute to several areas of social cognition such as research on redundancy biases, information aggregation, social sampling, and norm perceptions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

根据经验评估类别：简单的平均启发式。


我们分析人们如何根据与类别成员的经历形成对类别的评价性判断。先前的研究表明，这种评价判断取决于某种经验平均值，但不清楚具体类型的平均值。我们假设类别的评估可以由该类别的经验的简单平均值或成员平均值（类别成员的评估的平均值，其中类别成员的评估是该特定类别的经验的平均值）驱动。成员）。在人们对类别成员获得不平衡数量的观察的情况下，例如当人们对某个社会群体形成看法并主要与该群体的少数成员互动时，了解类别的评估是由简单平均值还是成员平均值驱动非常重要。在九项研究（N = 1,966）中，我们一致发现，对类别的评价判断用简单平均值比用成员平均值更好地解释。我们将潜在的认知策略称为简单平均启发式。收集的证据表明，即使在规范原则要求避免使用这种认知策略的环境中，参与者也会依赖简单的平均，从而导致系统性错误。我们的研究结果对社会认知的多个领域做出了贡献，例如冗余偏差、信息聚合、社会抽样和规范认知的研究。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。