A Semiotic Approach to Understand the Role of Communication in the Construction of the Social Reality

Biases in social judgments often emerge and persist in the absence of supporting evidence. A predominant explanation is that individuals are motivated to perceive and construct patterns in the world around them that serve their existing beliefs. The present chapter illustrates how basic features of communication can contribute to the development of biased judgments without any motivated processing. As an example, it uses the genesis of similarity-based illusory correlations from semiotic communication constraints. In particular, the authors propose that such an illusory correlation can originate in the proximal cue system required to communicate information about distal concepts that are not amenable to direct perception. When such distal concepts share the same cues used in communication, these two concepts appear interrelated due to cue overlap; they take on properties of the sign system used for communication. The chapter delineates this semiotic approach and presents evidence from experiments and simulation studies.