GROUP DECISIONS AS SOCIAL INFERENCE HEURISTICS

Three experiments investigated whether people use group decision outcomes as heuristic cues to judge group members' attitudes. In Experiment 1, subjects read a vignette in which a group's decision either was explicitly stated or in which subjects were compelled to infer the decision from other relevant information. It was hypothesized that Ss would be more likely to use the group decision outcome as an inference heuristic when the outcome was provided for them than when they were forced to generate that outcome. The results confirmed our hypothesis. In Experiment 2, a group decision was presented to Ss for whom the decision was either high or low in personal relevance. The results showed that Ss displayed a stronger correspondence bias for group decisions low in personal relevance than for ones high in personal relevance. Moreover, the decision outcome was better remembered over time than other decision-relevant information. Experiment 3 replicated this result for a nondichotomous decision outcome and also found that the more likely Ss were to remember the outcome over time, the more correspondent their inferences became. These and other data are shown to support a heuristic model of the social inference process.