Evaluations and expectations: A Bayesian model†

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Mathematical Sociology Session of the 1974 American Sociological Association Meetings. The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support received from the Canada Council in the form of a leave fellowship for the 1973–74 academic year.

This paper focuses on the effect of performance evaluations on expectations about future performances: given a situation where two persons know the evaluations they receive at each step of a series of performances, a process model is proposed to account for changes in their expectations as a function of the given evaluations. The approach consists of looking at the problem as a special case of information processing, and of using Bayes' theorem for the construction of the model. Thus, instead of asking about the effect on a person's expectations of a certain evaluation, we ask how a piece of evidence affects the subjective probability attached to a given hypothesis. A few illustrative runs are presented and discussed.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Mathematical Sociology Session of the 1974 American Sociological Association Meetings. The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support received from the Canada Council in the form of a leave fellowship for the 1973–74 academic year.

Martha Foschi, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1W5.