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Getting to know you: Accuracy and error in judgments of character
Author(s) -
Westra Evan
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12258
Subject(s) - attribution , worry , skepticism , psychology , everyday life , trait , character (mathematics) , trustworthiness , character traits , cognition , social psychology , cognitive psychology , epistemology , philosophy , computer science , anxiety , geometry , mathematics , neuroscience , psychiatry , programming language
Abstract Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of research on trait attribution have shown that these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This raises a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has some deeply disturbing implications. I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: Under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character‐trait judgments are in fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading‐based account of trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate.