Pursuing an availability-heuristic explanation of lay evaluations of social psychological research findings

Abstract

Research scientists view obvious research findings as ¿trivial.¿ Lay persons may not share this belief. Studies have shown that research results in social psychology considered obvious are also considered important. The current research investigated one possible explanation for lay judges' evaluations of research¿the use of an availability heuristic. Latencies to judge the obviousness and importance of social psychological research findings were examined, along with latencies to generate examples of these findings, subjective ratings of example generation ease, example recall, and number of examples generated. Results indicate that the judgments of obviousness are related to many measures of example generation ease and that importance judgments are related to one such measure. The relationship between the judged obviousness and importance of research cannot be fully explained by the ease with which examples of the research can be retrieved from memory. Implications for the dissemination of social psychological research to the lay public as well as the role of process information in judgment are discussed.