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This short chapter summarizes the analyses of introversive and extroversive memory and spells out their wider ramifications. The philosophical analysis of memory can make an important contribution to the critical evaluation of the commonsensical criteria we use to assess the accuracy of our own and other people's memory reports. Moreover, the philosophical analysis of memory is able to provide a completely general test of when a memory report is accurate and when it is not.

Reform efforts aimed solely at elevating the democratic quality of campaigns are unlikely by themselves to have much success. At the same time, there is ample justification for attempting to gain greater control over the campaign environment for a different reason: to improve the accuracy with which elections record public opinion. In addition, the book's argument suggests that we might be well advised to shift priorities by worrying somewhat less than we do about problems of public opinion formation that appear during campaigns, and worrying somewhat more than we do about the problems and dynamics of public opinion formation in civil society.

In the United States, WWV is the obvious time standard to check a clock against. WWV's claimed time accuracy as transmitted in Boulder, Colorado is 10 microseconds short term, and 1 second in 3,000 years long term. The received short-term accuracy is reduced to 0.001 second due to variations in the time signal's transit time. An exception is the better received short-term accuracy of 100 microseconds in WWV's 60-kHz ground wave signal, which can be improved even further to 10 microseconds by using proper averaging techniques. A shortwave radio receiver is needed to pick up the WWV signal. This chapter describes an electronic method of accurately comparing a clock's time against WWV's time.

This chapter deals with simple pendulums and with several things that can be done to improve their accuracy. Most of the items have only a minor effect on accuracy, but they add up. The pendulum should be enclosed in a case to protect it from the air currents of an open room, which will push the pendulum around and give erratic timing. A metal pendulum rod is recommended over a wooden one. If the pendulum is not temperature compensated, a low thermal expansion metal like iron must be chosen for the pendulum rod. If the pendulum is not temperature compensated, the bob must be supported at its bottom edge rather than at its middle or top edge. Other tips: use a low drag bob shape, walls dose to the pendulum cause a problem with relative humidity; slide the top end of the suspension spring up and down through a narrow slot; keep the number of piece parts and mechanical joints in a pendulum to a minimum.

This chapter addresses a central feature in most definitions of reputation-the content claims about attributes of the person. The truth of these claims entails two issues: first, the accuracy of the claims as representative of what is actually being said and believed about the person and, second, the validity of the claims themselves as checked against other sources of knowledge about the person. The accuracy issue deals with what is generally thought regarding social facts, narrative events, and personality trait attributions regarding the person. In contrast, seeking evidence for the validity of these reputational content claims takes us away from the membership of the reputational network and toward other sources of information about the person. Validational endeavors might engage inquiries by investigative journalists regarding social facts, historians regarding narrative events, and personality assessors regarding trait attributions.

Someone may express a claim within a system of presuppositions held by his hearers. The presuppositions are however not part of the claim, and the truth-value of the claim does not depend on the truth-value of the presuppositions. The presuppositions of a culture also act to limit the range over which type sentences have clear meanings. A statement being true is a matter of its truth — conditions being satisfied to the degree of accuracy appropriate in the context.

Biomechanical analysis of whole-body locomotion in different conditions is a unique tool for exploring the effects of environmental demands on movement control. This chapter reviews data from the literature and from research on how quadrupedal animals operate their four extremities, select gaits, distribute loads between fore- and hindlimbs, divide labor among joints to generate the mechanical energy necessary for propulsion, and select specific muscles around individual joints to meet various task demands (slope, speed, required accuracy, and perturbations). The data presented in the chapter provide new, important perspectives on the central and afferent mechanisms of whole-body posture and locomotion control.

This chapter traces the genealogy of the virtue of testimonial justice back to the State of Nature. Building on Bernard Williams' account of two basic ‘virtues of truth’, namely Accuracy and Sincerity, it is argued that an original virtue of Testimonial Justice is similarly a fundamental virtue of truth. The question of the virtue's status as either an intellectual or ethical virtue is addressed. It is argued that testimonial justice is a genuine hybrid — both ethical and intellectual — for it aims at once at truth and justice.

This chapter introduces the theory of “cultural scripts” and shows how it can help to explain miscommunication between “Anglos” and people from other cultural backgrounds. The notion of “cultural script” refers to a technique for articulating culture-specific norms, values, and communication practices using the metalanguage of universal human concepts. The use of this technique allows cultural scripts to be clear and precise, and accessible to both insiders and outsiders. The chapter approaches Anglo cultural scripts from the point of view of the subjective experience of immigrants to English-speaking countries — specifically Middle Eastern immigrants. The analysis of Anglo cultural scripts is based on linguistic evidence, but it is enriched by the testimony of immigrants, based on their cross-cultural experience.

Social perception in general, and accuracy in particular, can be viewed as being composed of different components. Several different componential approaches to accuracy (Cronbach’s [1955], Kenny’s [1994], and Judd & Park’s [1993]) are described, reviewed, and critically evaluated. For example, if Roberto accurately predicts the weather to be warm and sunny tomorrow, is that because he is an inveterate optimist who usually predicts good things, because he usually predicts the weather in particular to be nice, or because he has based his prediction for tomorrow on the latest and most valid in meteorological tools? Each of these reasons can be viewed as a “component” (one component is his tendency to predict good things, another is his tendency to predict uniquely good weather, the third is his knowledge of tomorrow’s weather in particular). This chapter concludes that although componential approaches provide important and useful information about the processes of social judgment and sources of accuracy and inaccuracy, the claim that one “must” assess components in order to assess accuracy—often made by advocates of componential approaches—is not justified. Several productive and instructive theoretical perspectives on accuracy that are not explicitly componential are reviewed. Although they do not “conflict” with componential approaches, they do demonstrate that one can productively study accuracy without performing an explicitly componential analysis. These include correlational approaches to accuracy (which include an instructive subsection emphasizing the similarities of assessing social perceptual accuracy to those of assessing construct validity in the social sciences), Brunswik’s Lens Model, Funder’s Realistic Accuracy Model, and Dawes’ Improper Linear Models. Nonetheless, this chapter also concludes that understanding componential approaches also contributes to a greater understanding of results even obtained from approaches that do not specifically perform componential analyses.

This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding Chapter 17, which reviews every high-quality scientific investigation of the (in)accuracy of stereotypes that I could find. Chapter 16 facilitates understanding Chapter 17 by discussing how understanding accuracy requires first understanding three different levels of analysis (population, small group, person perception), that (in)accuracy at one level rarely provides any information about (in)accuracy at any of the other levels, and that researchers committed to a view of stereotypes as inaccurate frequently do indeed confound these levels; reviewing the earliest research suggesting that stereotypes are not necessarily inaccurate, including the “kernel of truth” hypothesis, and the fact that this empirical evidence apparently had no effect on the dominant view in the social sciences that stereotypes were inaccurate; discussing the quality standards that studies had to meet to be included in the Chapter 17 review; discussing the main two types of stereotype (in)accuracy, discrepancies from perfection and correspondence with real differences; and discussing how these two types of (in)accuracy can occur at the level of either consensual stereotypes (what most people generally believe) or personal stereotypes (what a particular individual believes). Understanding these issues is necessary for understanding the review of empirical research on stereotype accuracy in the next chapter.

This chapter examines the role of stereotypes in enhancing or reducing the accuracy of person perception. It points out that relying on an inaccurate stereotype will usually reduce accuracy of person perception and this may help explain why many social scientists seem to assume that any influence of a stereotype on person perception is something bad and biased that leads people astray. However, as Chapter 17 showed, stereotype accuracy is one of the largest effects in social psychology. This raises the question: Will relying on accurate stereotypes enhance or reduce the accuracy of person perception? This chapter’s answer is: It depends. The chapter identifies three different situations on which the answer depends: When people have vividly clear, credible, relevant individuating information, they usually (though not always) should rely on it and ignore their stereotypes; when people have ambiguous or only partially informative individuating information, they should rely on both their (accurate) stereotype and the individuating information; and when people have no individuating information, relying on their (accurate) stereotype will maximize the accuracy of their person perception predictions. The scientific evidence is then reviewed, and, perhaps shockingly, it shows that how people integrate stereotypes and individuating information to arrive at person perception judgments approximately corresponds to what they should do to be as rational and accurate as possible. The chapter ends by introducing the Stereotype Rationality Hypothesis, which suggests that laypeople largely (though not perfectly) rely on stereotypes when doing so is most likely to lead to accurate predictions and inferences, and they readily prefer relevant individuating information when it is most likely to lead to accurate predictions and inferences.

This chapter captures and summarizes some of the major themes and implications of the prior four chapters on stereotypes: It highlights the broad and general conclusions, based on the scientific, empirical evidence on stereotype accuracy, that are and are not justified; it highlights the prevalence of the “processistic fallacy”—of basing conclusions emphasizing stereotype inaccuracy on research that merely discovers (supposedly flawed) processes, but without actually assessing accuracy; it reviews evidence on the “wisdom of crowds” to explain why consensual stereotypes are not the false cultural myths they are often accused of being and, instead, are generally far more accurate than personal stereotypes; it highlights limitations to existing empirical research on stereotype (in)accuracy; it reviews the limited evidence on conditions under which high stereotype inaccuracy either has been found or is likely to be found; and it introduces the “egalitarian denial” hypothesis, which predicts that people highly motivated to be or appear egalitarian are those most likely to develop inaccurate stereotypes, because they will often underestimate real differences. This chapter also concludes that many social science perspectives on stereotypes are exaggerated, inaccurate, and rigidly resistant to change in the face of relentless disconfirming evidence and maintain their conclusions by virtue of a very selective focus on studies and findings that confirm the a priori belief in the irrationality and badness of stereotypes.

This chapter reviews interesting and important research on self-fulfilling prophecies, expectancy biases, and accuracy that did not fit elsewhere in this book. With respect to self-fulfilling prophecies, this chapter reviews evidence on processes and moderators, stereotype threat, stereotype priming, and rejection sensitivity. With respect to bias, this chapter reviews recent research on race bias in jury selection and, more generally, implores my fellow social psychologists to begin developing some standards for evaluating the true power and extent of bias (e.g., by articulating a model of rationality and assessing both how much people deviate from it and how close they come to it). With respect to accuracy, research on empathic accuracy and accuracy from thin slices of behavior is reviewed.

This chapter examines the issues of accuracy and trust involved in the Hutton Report. It explains that Lord Hutton's interpretation of the events surrounding the death of David Kelly led him to focus on a range of accusations and counter-accusations. The British government and the BBC had accused one another of inaccuracy and of making partly untruthful claims. This chapter suggests that though many of the documents disclosed in the Hutton Report rely on procedures that help secure accuracy, some of the people quoted in the report made claims that turned out to be inaccurate and they also dispensed with procedures that are important for securing accuracy.

This chapter suggests an experimental approach to vegetation sampling in general, and to plant diversity sampling in particular. It is assumed that most available sampling techniques are like hypotheses that must be proven — proven accurate, precise, complete, and cost-efficient. Only after careful observation, repeated trials, and comparisons with other techniques can the hypotheses (methods) be accepted or rejected. A framework for sampling plant diversity includes initial decisions on goals, objectives, scale, and sampling design. Sampling design is further complicated by decisions on plot size and shape, sample size, intensity of sampling, and pattern of sampling, which interact and affect the results of plant diversity studies. Following the generalized framework that follows may help in planning landscape-scale plant diversity studies, and in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of alternative study designs and field techniques.