Pachur,T.
Hertwig,R.
Rieskamp,J.

Covering a seemingly boundless variety of topics, contemporary pollsters from Gallup, the Pew Center, and Harris Interactive sample people's opinions, beliefs, preferences, customs, and morals. Probing a small but representative section of the population, they aim to infer what most of us think and feel. The thesis of this chapter is that canvassing samples of people to infer and to predict characteristics of the social world at large is not the prerogative of the pollsters. Like Gallup's interviewers, the human mind can also roam through its personal social spaces to sample instances and garner information, enabling it to make inferences about the social world. There are, however, important differences between professional and the mind's intuitive polling: The mind's samples—drawn from the external social world or from memory—are minute, relative to the thousands of respondents in Gallup polls. Furthermore, the mind's sample is an unrepresentative one, because it is drawn from a person's social environment, and people tend to know others who are more similar to themselves than to a randomly drawn person. How do people make inferences about the behavior and characteristics of others based on instances sampled from their social environment? And how accurate are the strategies that people might use—given the limitations of the samples available to an individual mind mentioned above? In what follows, we will describe the rationale and the social rationality of instance-based inference. Moreover, we will propose the social-circle heuristic, which people could use for making predictions about their social world based on limited search. We will examine the prescriptive and descriptive accuracy of the heuristic, its ecological rationality and boundary conditions, and will explore different domains (such as norm and attitude formation) in which the heuristic might guide our social reasoning. The social-circle heuristic conceptualizes an individual's social network in terms of circles with increasing scope, with smaller circles being more "socially proximal" to the center of the network: the self. Based on these two alternative structures of the social environment (i.e., altruism and frequency of contact), we distinguish two variants of the social-circle heuristic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)

Pachur, T., Hertwig, R., & Rieskamp, J. (2013). The mind as an intuitive pollster: Frugal search in social spaces. In R. Hertwig, U. Hoffrage, & the ABC Research Group, Simple heuristics in a social world (pp. 261-291). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Publication year	2013
Document type:	In book
Publication status:	Published
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Keywords:	attitudefrequencyheuristicsmemorynormssamplingsocial circlessocial network