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estimations on an unfamiliar task were affected by the quantity of the task work completed. Participants whose work resulted in a large pile of material rated their performance higher than participants whose work resulted in small pile. However, the amount of actual work done was the same. Moreover, if the pile was not in sight at the time of judgment, then performance estimates did not differ.

Pelham, Sumarta, and Myaskovsky (1994) demonstrated an effect similar to the quantity principle, which they called the numerosity heuristic. This heuristic refers to the use of the number of units as a cue for judgment. For example, the researchers found that participants rated the area of a circle as larger when the circle was presented as pieces that were difficult to imagine as a whole circle than if the pieces were presented so that it was easy to imagine, and larger than the undivided circle. This result suggests that dividing a whole into pieces will lead to those pieces being thought of as larger than the whole, and this will be especially so when it is hard to imagine the pieces as the whole. That is, the numerosity of the stimulus to be rated can affect the rating of that stimulus.

Anchoring. Anchoring is similar to availability and quantity heuristics, because it involves making a judgment using some stimulus as a starting point, and adjusting from that point. For example, Sherif, Taub, and Hovland (1958) had people make estimates of weight on a six-point scale. Prior to each estimation, subjects held an ‘‘anchor’’ weight that was said to represent ‘‘6’’ on the scale. When the anchor’s weight was close to the other weights, then subjects’ judgments were also quite close to the anchor, with a modal response of 6 on the sixpoint scale. However, heavier anchors resulted in lower responses. The heaviest anchor produced a modal response of 2.

However, anchoring need not involve the direct experience of a stimulus. Simply mentioning a stimulus can lead to an anchoring effect. Kahneman and Tversky (1972) assigned people the number 10 or 65 by means of a seemingly random process

(a wheel of fortune). These people then estimated the percentage of African countries in the United Nations. Those assigned the number 10 estimated 25 percent, and those assigned the number 65 estimated 45 percent (at the time the actual percentage was 35). This indicates the psychological

impact of one’s starting point (or anchor), when making a judgment.

An anecdotal example of someone trying to fight the anchoring phenomenon is a writer who tears up a draft of what she is working on, and throws it away, rather than trying to work with that draft. It may seem wasteful to have created something, only to throw it out. However, at times, writers may feel that what they have produced is holding them in a place that they do not want to be. Thus, it could be better to throw out that draft, rather than trying to rework it, which is akin to pulling up anchor.

Endowment Effect. Related to anchoring is the tendency people have to stay where they are. This tendency is known as the endowment effect (Thaler 1980) or the status quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser 1988). This tendency results in people wanting more for something they already have than they would be willing to pay to acquire that same thing. In economic terms, this would be described as a discrepancy between what people are willing to pay (WTP) and what they are willing to accept (WTA). Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1990) found WTA amounts much higher for an item already possessed than WTP amounts to obtain that item. In their study, half of the people in a university class were given a university coffee mug, and half were not. A short time later, the people with the mugs were asked how much money they wanted for their mug (their WTA amount), and those without the mug were asked how much they would pay to get a mug (their WTP amount).

The median WTA amount was about twice the median WTP amount: WTA = $7.12, WTP = $2.87. Thus, few trades were made, and this is consistent with the idea that people often seem to prefer what they have to what they could have.

Representativeness. People may make judgments using representativeness, which is the tendency to judge events as more likely if they represent the typical or expected features for that class of events. Thus, representativeness occurs when people judge an event using an impression of the event rather than a systematic analysis of it. Two examples of representativeness misleading people are the gambler’s fallacy and the conjunction fallacy.

The gambler’s fallacy is the confusion of independent and dependent events. Independent events are not causally related to each other (e.g., coin

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flips, spins of a roulette wheel, etc.). Dependent events are causally related; what happened in the past has some bearing on what happens in the present (e.g., the amount of practice has some bearing on how well someone will perform in a competition). The confusion arises when people’s expectations for independent events are violated. For example, if a roulette wheel comes up black eighteen times in a row, some people might think that red must be the result of the next spin.

However, the likelihood of red on the next spin is the same as it is each and every spin, and the same as it would be if red, instead of black, had resulted on each of the previous eighteen spins. Each and every roulette wheel spin is an independent event.

The conjunction fallacy (Tversky and Kahneman

1983) occurs when people judge the conjunction of two events as more likely than (at least) one of the two events. The ‘‘Linda scenario’’ has been frequently studied: Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Following that description, subjects are asked to rank order in terms of probability several statements including the following: Linda is active in the feminist movement. [F] Linda is a bank teller. [B] Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. [B&F]

The conjunction fallacy is committed if people rank the B&F statement higher (so more likely) than either the B or F statement alone, because that is logically impossible. The likelihood of B&F may be equal to B or F, but it cannot be greater than either of them, because B&F is a subset of the set of B events and the set of F events.

People find events with multiple parts (such as B&F) more plausible than separate events (such as

B or F alone), but plausibility is not equal to likelihood. Making an event more plausible might make it a better story, which could be misleading and result in erroneous inferences (Markovits and

Nantel 1989). Indeed, some have suggested that people act as if they are constructing stories in their minds and then make judgments based on the stories they construct (Pennington and Hastie 1993). But of course good stories are not always true, or even likely.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Another question about decision processing is whether there are individual differences between people in their susceptibility to erroneous decision making. For example, do some people tend to inappropriately use the heuristics outlined above, and if so, is there a factor that accounts for that inappropriate use?

Stanovich and West (1998) had participants do several judgment tasks and related the performance on those tasks to assessments of cognitive ability and thinking styles. They found that cognitive capacity does account for some performance on some judgment tasks, which suggests that computational limitations could be a partial explanation of non-normative responding (i.e., judgment errors). Also, independent of cognitive ability, thinking styles accounted for some of the participants’ performance on some judgment tasks.

A similar suggestion is that some erroneous judgments are the result of participants’ conversational ability. For example, Slugoski and Wilson

(1998) show that six errors in social judgment are related to people’s conversational skills. They suggest that judgment errors may not be errors, because participants may be interpreting the information presented to them differently than the researcher intends (see also Hilton and Slugoski 1999).

Finally, experience affects decision-making ability. Nisbett, Krantz, Jepson, and Kunda (1983) found that participants with experience in the domain in question preferred explanations that reflected statistical inferences. Similarly, Fong,

Krantz, and Nisbett (1986) found that statistical explanations were used more often by people with more statistical training. These results suggest that decision-making ability can improve through relevant domain experience, as well as through statistical training that is not domain specific.

GROUP DECISION MAKING

Social Dilemmas. Social dilemmas occur when the goals of individuals conflict with the goals of their group; individuals face the dilemma of choosing between doing what is best for them personally and what is best for the group as a whole (Lopes

1994). Hardin (1965) was one of the first to write about these dilemmas in describing the ‘‘tragedy

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of the commons.’’ The tragedy was that individuals tried to maximize what they could get from the common and, or the ‘‘commons,’’ which resulted in the commons being overused, thereby becoming depleted. If each individual had only used his allotted share of the commons, then it would have continued to be available to everyone.

Prisoner’s Dilemma. The best-known social dilemma is the prisoner’s dilemma (PD), which involves two individuals (most often, although formulations with more than two people are possible). The original PD involved two convicts’ decision whether or not to confess to a crime (Rapoport and Chammah 1965). But the following example is functionally equivalent.

Imagine you are selling an item to another person, but you cannot meet to make the exchange. You agree to make the exchange by post. You will send the other person the item, and receive the money in return. If you both do so, then you each get 3 units (arbitrary amount, but amounts received for each combination of choices is important). However, you imagine that you could simply not put the item in the post, yet still receive the money. Imagine doing so results in you getting 5 units and the other person −1 units. However, the other person similarly thinks that not posting the money would result in getting the item for free, which would result in 5 units for the other person and −1 for you. If you both do not put anything in the post, although you agreed to do so, you would be at the status quo (0 units each).

Do you post the item (i.e., cooperate) or not? Regardless of what the other person does, you will get more out of not cooperating (5 v. 3, when the other person cooperates, and 0 v. −1, when other does not). However, if you both do not cooperate, that produces an inferior group outcome, compared to cooperating (0 [0+0] v. 6 [3+3], respectively). Thus, the dilemma is that each individual has an incentive to not cooperate, but the best outcome for the group is obtained when each person cooperates. Can cooperation develop from such a situation?

Axelrod (1984; cf. Hofstader 1985) investigated that question by soliciting people to participate

in a series of PD games (social dilemmas are often referred to as games). Each person submitted a strategy for choosing to cooperate or not over a series of interactions with the other strategies.

Each interaction would result in points being awarded to each strategy, and the strategy that generated the most points won. The winning strategy was Tit for Tat. It was also the simplest strategy. The Tit for Tat strategy is to cooperate on the first turn, and then do whatever the other person just did

(i.e., on turn x, Tit for Tat will do whatever its opponent did on turn x−1).

Axelrod suggested that four qualities led to Tit for Tat’s success. First, it was a nice strategy, because it first cooperates, and Tit for Tat will cooperate as long as the other person cooperates. But when the other person does not cooperate, then it immediately retaliates. That is, it responds to noncooperation with noncooperation, which illustrates its second good quality. Tit for Tat is provocable, because it immediately reacts to noncooperation, rather than waiting to see what will happen next, or ignore the noncooperation. However, if the opponent goes back to cooperating, then Tit for

Tat will also go back to cooperating. That is quality three: forgiveness. Tit for Tat will not continue punishing the other player for previous noncooperations. All that counts for Tit for Tat is what just happened, not the total amount of noncooperation that has happened. Finally, Tit for Tat has clarity, because it is simple to understand. A complex strategy can be confusing, so it may be misunderstood by opponents. If the opponent’s intentions are unclear, then noncooperation is best, because if or when a complex strategy is going to be cooperative cannot be predicted.

Thus, a cooperative strategy can be effective even when there are clear incentives for noncooperation. Furthermore, Axelrod did another computer simulation in which strategies were rewarded by reproducing themselves, rather than simply accumulating points. Thus, success meant that the strategy had more of its kind to interact with.

Again, Tit for Tat was best, which further suggests that a cooperative strategy can be effective and can

flourish in situations that seem to be designed for noncooperation.

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Bargaining and Fairness. Bargaining and negotiation have received increasing attention in decision theory and research (e.g., Pruitt and Carnevale 1993), as has the issue of justice or fairness (e.g., Mellers and Baron 1993). These issues are involved in the ‘‘ultimatum game,’’ which involves two people and a resource (often a sum of money). The rules of the game are that one person proposes a division of the resource between them (a bargain), and the other person accepts or rejects the proposal. If the proposal is rejected, then both people get nothing, so the bargain is an ultimatum: this or nothing.

Expected utility (EU) theory suggests that the person dividing the resource should offer the other person just enough to get him to accept the bargain, but no more. Furthermore, EU suggests the person should accept any division, because any division will be more than zero, which is what the person will receive if the bargain is refused. However, typically the bargain is a fifty-fifty split (half of the resource to each person). Indeed, if people are offered anything less than a fifty-fifty split, they will often reject the offer, although that will mean they get nothing, rather than what they were offered, because that seems unfair.

In studies, people have evaluated these bargains in two ways. People can rate how attractive a bargain is (e.g., on a 1–7 scale). Possible divisions to be rated might be: $40 for you, $40 for the other person; $50 for you, $70 for the other person, and so on. Thus, bargains are presented in isolation, one after another, as if each was an individual case unrelated to anything else. This type of presentation is generally referred to as ‘‘absolute judgment’’ (Wever and Zener 1928).

Alternatively, people may evaluate bargains in pairs, and choose one. For example, do you prefer a bargain where you get $40, and the other person gets $40, or a bargain where you get $50, and the other person gets $70? Thus, the bargains are presented such that they can be compared, so people can see the relative outcomes. This type of presentation is generally referred to as ‘‘comparative judgment.’’

Absolute and comparative judgment have different results in the ‘‘ultimate’’ bargaining game.

Blount and Bazerman (1996) gave pairs of participants $10 to be divided between them. In absolute judgment (i.e., is this bargain acceptable?), the money holder accepted a minimum division of $4 for him and $6 for the other person. But asked in a comparative judgment format (i.e., do you prefer this bargain or nothing?), participants were willing to accept less (a minimum division of $2.33 for the money holder and $7.67 for the other person). This result suggests that considering situations involving the division or distribution of resources on a case-by-case basis (absolute judgment) may result in sub-optimal choices (relative to those resulting from comparative judgment) for each person involved, as well as the group as a whole.

Comparative and absolute judgment can be applied to social issues as adoption. There has been controversy about adoption, when the adopting parents have a different cultural heritage than the child being adopted. Some argue that a child should be adopted only by parents of the same cultural heritage as the child to preserve the child’s connection to his or her culture. That argument views this situation as an absolute judgment: should children be adopted by parents of a different cultural heritage or not?

However, there is an imbalance between the cultural heritages of the children to be adopted and those of the parents wanting to adopt. That imbalance creates the dilemma of what to do with children who would like to be adopted when there are no parents of the same cultural heritage wanting to adopt them. That dilemma suggests this comparative judgment: should children be adopted by parents of a different cultural heritage than their own, or should children be left unadopted (e.g., be brought up in a group home)?

The answers to these absolute and comparative judgments may differ, because the answer may be that a child should not be adopted by parents of a different cultural heritage as an absolute judgment, but as a comparative judgment the answer may be that a child should be adopted by such parents, despite the cultural differences, because having parents is better than not having parents.

Thus, the best answer may differ depending on

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how the situation is characterized. Such situations may involve more than one value (in this case, the values are providing parents for a child and preserving the cultural heritage that the child was born into). Typically, absolute judgements reflect an acceptance or rejection of one value, while comparative judgments reflect more than one value.

GENERAL JUDGMENT AND DECISION-

MAKING ISSUES

That the best solution for a situation can seem different if the situation is characterized differently is one of the most important issues in judgment and decision making. The theories mentioned above (Bayes’s, EU, prospect, and rank-depend- ent) assume problem invariance. That is, they assume that people’s judgments will not vary with how the problem is characterized. However, because the characterization of the problem affects how people frame the problem, people’s decisions often do vary. (Tversky and Kahneman 1981).

An implication of this variability is that eliciting people’s values becomes difficult (Baron 1997; 1998). However, different methods can produce contradictory results. For example, choice and matching tasks often reveal different values preferences. Choice tasks are comparative judgments: Do you prefer A or B? Matching tasks require participants to estimate one dimension of an alternative so that its attractiveness matches that of another alternative (e.g., program A will cure 60 percent of patients at a cost of $5 million, what should B cost if it will cure 85 percent of patients?).

The difference produced by these tasks has been extensively examined in studies of preference reversals (Slovic and Lichtenstein 1983). Tversky, Sattath, and Slovic (1988) have suggested that the dimension of elicitation (e.g., probability or value) will be weighted most, so reversals can result from changing the elicitation dimension. Fischer and Hawkins (1993) suggested that preference reversals were the result of the compatibility between people’s strategy for analyzing the problem and the elicitation mode. Preference reversals clearly occur, but the cause of them continues to be debated (cf. Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1992).

Ideas about rationality have also been influenced by the variability of people’s judgments. Generally, the idea of rationality originated with a theory and then examined whether people behaved in that way, rather than examining how people behave and then suggesting what is rational. That is, rationality has typically been examined based on a prescriptive theory, such as Bayes’s or EU, about how people should make decisions rather than a descriptive theory based on how people actually process information. When studies resulted in judgments that were inconsistent with those prescriptive theories of decision making, researchers concluded that people often acted irrationally.

However, there is growing recognition that study participants may be thinking of situations differently than researchers have assumed (Chase,

Hertwig, and Gigerenzer 1998), which has led several researchers to create theories about decision processing (e.g., Dougherty, Gettys, and Ogden in press; Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, and Kleinbolting

1991) and use those theories to address rationality issues rather than the reverse. Approaches that focus on processing have been present in decision theory for some time (cf. Brunswick 1952; Hammond 1955), but they have not been dominant in the field. The acknowledgement of multiple views of rationality coupled with the poor explanations of prescriptive theories for people’s actual decision behavior may shift the emphasis to processing models.

Further consideration of the decision-making process has led to other questions that are garnering increased attention. For example, how do people make decisions within dynamic environments? Generally, people make decisions in a dynamic world (Brehmer 1990; Busemeyer and Townsend 1993; Diehl and Sterman 1995), but many decision-making theories (such as those reviewed above) do not account for the dynamics of the environment. Also, how do people’s emotions affect the decision-making process? Decisions can involve topics that evoke emotion or have emotional consequences (such as regret, Gilovich and Medvec 1995). Some decision theories have tried to include emotional considerations in decision

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making (e.g., Bell 1982), but this topic deserves more attention. These questions, as well as the issues discussed above, will make decision theory and research an area of continued interest and relevance.

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EVAN THACKERAY PRITCHARD

DEDUCTION/INDUCTION

See Experiments; Quasi-Experimental Research

Designs; Scientific Explanation; Statistical

Inference.

DEMOCRACY

Democracy is one of the most important subjects in the social sciences. From the work of de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century through the work of the best contemporary scholars, democracy has been studied closely and debated widely (Tocqueville 1969). Democracy has drawn this attention primarily because, in spite of the fact that it is quite rare historically, it has come to have enormous legitimacy in the eyes of many individuals worldwide.

This has not always been the case. Democracy has been severely criticized by those on both the political right and left. But few scholars today question whether democracy is a social good.

Democracy is also important because many historically undemocratic countries have adopted it as a system of government. Many such changes have occurred only in the years since the Cold War (Huntington 1991). By 1994, over half the countries in the world had some form of democratic governance, a doubling of the number of nationstates so organized within 25 years (Lipset 1994).

At the core of most discussions of democracy is a common understanding that democracy is a method of governance or decision making for organizations or societies in which the members of that organization or society participate, directly or indirectly, in the decision making of that group.

Further, members affect decision making to such an extent that they can be thought of as actually governing that organization or society. In short, democracy is a system of governance in which members control group decision making.

Not all considerations on democracy have shared this understanding. For example, those working in the Marxist tradition saw any state, democratic or not, as the expression of a class struggle. As such, any state was inherently undemocratic, absent the creation of a classless, communist, and hence truly democratic, society (Held

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1995). Subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its affiliated states, and the full exposure of the failures of those regimes, such an extreme view has been almost entirely rejected.

The common understanding of democracy as participation by members or citizens in the decision making of an organization or society still leaves considerable room for dispute. Two issues are central: First, who are, or should be, considered members of the society? Second, what does, or should, constitute a minimum level of control over decision making by members for a system to be thought of as democratic? In short, how much participation is necessary for a system to be democratic? These questions are not simply matters of empirical observation of the world, but also matters for moral and political philosophy.

Three additional factors add to the difficulty of approaching democracy as a field of sociological research. First, analysts of democracy all too often use different definitions of democracy, or fail to define democracy clearly. Democratic systems of governance can be characterized by many attributes—frequency of member participation, the form of member participation, and so forth. Establishing whether a particular system of governance is democratic, involves making decisions about which attributes are essential to a democratic system. Where there is no specific definition of democracy or where definitions conflict, evaluating research on democracy can be tasking (Macpherson 1972).

A second factor increasing the difficulty of this subject matter is that democracy is a system of governance found in many different kinds of collectivities, including states, formal organizations, and informal groups. It is thus necessary to be cautious in applying models, findings, and relationships across different types of collectivities.

When general propositions about democracy are advanced, it is important to evaluate those propositions at multiple levels of analysis.

A third difficulty is that social scientists are interested in democracy not just for its own sake, but also because it is thought to be associated with other critical issues. Many important questions

involve considerations of democracy: What is the effect of democracy on the success of organizations and nation-states? Does democracy promote individual liberty? What is the effect of democracy on income inequality and social stratification? What is the relationship between democracy and civil society? Can market economies prosper in the absence of democracy? All these and more force sociologists to consider the consequences, as well as the causes, of democracy.

While the difficulties of studying democracy are daunting, much significant work has been done in this field. Democracy has been studied as an outcome and as a cause, and has been studied at both the level of the nation-state, and at the level of the organization.

To begin with, there is work in the sociology of democracy on the question of who is or should be members or citizens of a democratic polity. Most systems commonly thought to be democratic have throughout history excluded some portion of those subject to the will of the democracy from participation in the decision-making process. Such exclusion has occurred on the basis of race, sex, income, relationship to property, criminal status, mental health, religion, age, and other characteristics. While use of many of these categories as a justification for excluding individuals from participation has declined in recent times, others remain, and there is continuing disagreement about the moral and political bases for excluding or including specific groups or categories of individuals. Migrant workers in Western Europe, for example, are subject to the action of the state on a long-term basis and yet remain excluded from full political participation in those states (Brubaker 1989). At the level of the organization, there are individuals affected by the decisions of the organization who may have little or no say in the decisions that affect them.

These can include individuals both outside the organization (‘‘stakeholders’’) and inside the organization. Regarding affected individuals outside the organization, there are occasional movements to increase the power of stakeholders over the decisions of the organization (Nader, Green, and

Seligman 1976). While unsuccessful at a general level, there has been a shift toward permitting

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stakeholders increased access to legal redress, for example, in class action lawsuits and in environmental litigation. And regarding those within the organization, one way to understand the management trends toward ‘‘total quality management,’’ participatory management, and economic democracy is that they are attempts to increase democratic participation of workers in decisions that affect them (Jarley, Fiorito, and Delaney 1997).

Sociologists have often focused on the forms of influence and participation that individuals have in decision making. Representative democracy is that form of governance in which members of the organization or polity exercise their control over the organization through the regular election of members of a decision-making body. It is traditional to view representative democracies as democratic because they provide for the expression of interests through the election of representatives.

For example, in the United States, citizens directly elect senators and representatives to the U.S. Congress, which in turn makes political decisions about the actions of the federal government. Theorists since the Enlightenment have argued that representative democracy is an appropriate means for conveying participation in decision making in largesize organizations, where individuals are thought not to be able to participate in all decisions (Hobbes

1968; Locke 1980; Mill 1962; Rousseau 1977).

But this view has been attacked by numerous critics, many of them sociologists. One of the most scathing criticisms, building on work by Mosca, is the analysis of democracy by Michels (Mosca 1939). Michels’s argument is that in any large organization (and, by extension, in any nation-state), a democratic system of governance inevitably leads to the rise of an oligarchy, and worse, to an oligarchy whose leaders have interests that differ from those of the ordinary members or citizens (Michels

1949). Why is this inevitable? In every instance of large democratic organization, Michels argues, oligarchy arises as a result of the organization’s requirement for experienced, skilled leaders. Experience in leadership, however, tends to give leaders access to key organizational resources, such as mailing lists, publicity, and greater experience, that are significant resources that the leadership

can use to return themselves to office year after year. And as leaders remain in office over an extended time, their interests and attitudes are likely to diverge from those of members. The divergence of interests is a result of the changed work and social experiences that accrue to leaders. Hence Michels, while arguing that formal organization is necessary for social life, and especially for politics, also believes that democracy in such organizations is essentially impossible.

Michels’s analysis has been taken very seriously in the social sciences, and there is some supporting evidence for his propositions. Weber described, and Heclo and Wilson separately concede, that there is a tendency for the civil service and bureaucracy to become unresponsive to the wishes of the people, as their experiences and needs differ from the people (Heclo 1977; Weber 1978; Wilson

1989). Lincoln and Zeitz have shown that as unions tend to get more professional, there is less member participation in decision making (Lincoln and Zeitz 1980). And for both unions and social movement organizations, Michels’s critique is taken so seriously as to generate sometimes drastic proposals for counteracting the oligarchical tendencies in these organizations (Kochan 1980). Piven and Cloward argue that reform movements of the poor should waste few resources on creating long-lasting organizations, but should instead create massive and disruptive protests (Piven and Cloward 1977).

However, Michels is not without his critics. Nyden argues that democratic unions are possible

(Nyden 1985). Weber himself, who was Michels’s teacher, was critical of his conclusions. Michels overstated the case, Weber argued, because he insisted on relying upon too pure or strict a definition of democracy. Having started with such an idealistic vision of democracy, Michels was bound to find that reality comes up short (Scaff 1981).

That too pure a definition of democracy can lead to a misplaced understanding of how democracy works, and a failure to appreciate its achievements, is the key assumption behind the most significant defense of democracy in the 1950s and

1960s—the pluralist account of democracy. Dahl’s

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