The social circle heuristic: Fast and frugal decisions based on small samples

Whereas reliance on information from one’s proximal social environment for generalizing about the population has often been associated with erroneous judgments, this information is often valuable and can be exploited for making accurate inferences. The social circle heuristic is a judgment mechanism in which the content and structure of people’s social networks are used for making inferences about frequencies in the population in a paired comparison task. Because the heuristic has a stopping rule, judgments generated by it will often be based on small samples sizes. In this paper we present experimental evidence that shows both that the social circle heuristic can compete with a more thorough strategy, and that people actually apply it.