Current Research Projects
Here are short descriptions of some of my current research projects. I will add descriptions of my work on physician-patient communication and volume estimation soon.
Judgments of Averages
How do people judge the average height, weight, attractiveness, or intelligence of a group of people? My research on this topic focuses on something I call the group size effect (Price, Smith, & Lench, 2006). People's judgments of averages are influenced by the number of individuals in the group being judged. For example, people judge the average height of a group of ten people to be greater than the average height of a group of five people ... even when the average heights of the groups are exactly the same.
The group size effect is important for at least two general reasons. One is that it might reveal some fundamental principles about how quantitative information is represented and processed in the brain. Another is that is it might help to explain other seemingly unrelated judgment phenomena. For example, college students have been shown to overestimate the amount of alcohol that the typical college student consumes. But this might be in part because a judgment about the typical college student is a judgment about a very large group.
Better-Than-Average Thinking
People generally judge themselves to be better than average in terms of a wide variety of traits and skills. For example, the vast majority of college students judge themselves to be friendlier and better bike riders than the average college student. One famous study showed that 94% of college professors judged themselves to be better than the average teacher at their own institution! (See also Price, 2006, for more on better-than-average thinking among college professors.)
My research here has focused on three issues. One is how the group size effect described above relates to better-than-average thinking. A second is how this phenomenon is influenced by the way one asks people to make their judgments (Price, Pentecost, & Voth, 2002). Perhaps the most intersting issue, though, is whether there are cultural differences in better-than-average thinking? Specifically, do people from Asian cultures--who tend to be more collectivistic and less individualistic than Westerners--judge themselves to be better than average? The answer here is complicated, but research from my lab (and elsewhere) suggests that there are important cultural differences, with Asians showing less better-than-average thinking than Westerners.