Professor Schwarz is the most recent contributor to the John M. MacEachran Memorial
Lecture Series. In this timely essay, Schwarz takes a position critical of traditional psychological
research asserting that: “Our [psychologists'] focus on individual thought processes
has fostered a neglect of the social context in which individuals do their thinking and this neglect
has contributed to the less than flattering portrait that psychology has painted of human
judgment” (p. 1). He posits that “fallacies of human judgment” reported in
studies of cognition and communication are actually fallacies of the
research—specifically, the researchers' failure to take into account the human
mind's capacity to make sense of things, particularly through communication embedded in
social context. His point is an important one. When involved in conversation (even in the
research laboratory), humans may suspend their abstract knowledge of the logic of language and
attend to irrelevant and misleading information—especially if they assume that the
speaker's intentions are to convey information and to make sense. Schwarz reports that
“ordinary kinds of talk” build on Gricean conversational implicatures, inferences
that “go beyond the semantic meaning of what is being said by determining the pragmatic
meaning of the utterance” (p. 11). Researchers underestimate the power of these
inferences and, by presenting decontextualized, at times absurd, information, they fail to
accurately measure their subjects' “human judgment,” but instead observe
their subjects' diligent, and often expert, attempts to make sense of the message.