Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Other People and Social Situations Shape Us?
Compare the questioner's opportunities with the contestant's, and track whose judgments change.
Why you’re reading it. Apply the opening distinction between a person's behavior and the conditions that make it visible.
A question to consider. How would you redesign the quiz so that judgments of knowledge depend less on who controls the questions?
Why this reading
A quiz questioner can display knowledge that a contestant has little opportunity to match. Ross and colleagues use that asymmetry to investigate how observers and participants judge ability when roles determine the evidence they see.
Before you read
A randomly assigned role need not provide an equal opportunity to perform. A yoked control uses material produced in an earlier condition: here, another person's questions. Keep judgments of general knowledge separate from answers on the quiz itself.
Read for
- Identify exactly what questioners can choose and what contestants can demonstrate.
- Compare the contestants' judgments with the questioners' judgments and the observers' judgments; they are not the same result.
- Use the control condition and the authors' note about preparation tasks to evaluate alternative explanations.
Consider afterwards
- An interviewer asks questions from their own specialty and concludes that an applicant knows little. What comparison would help distinguish knowledge from the opportunity to display it?
Editorial context
The experiments involved Stanford students and a tightly arranged encounter. Contestants and observers showed the central bias; questioners did not show the same pattern. Role assignment also changed question-preparation tasks, a limitation the authors discuss. The study supports a bounded claim about role-shaped evidence, not a universal inability to recognize circumstances or a complete account of inequality.