Resumen de Predicting what we will like: : Asking a stranger can be as good as asking a friend

Casey M. Eggleston, Timothy D. Wilson, Minha Lee, Daniel T. Gilbert

• When predicting how much they will like something they have not encountered before, people use three commonsense theories: It is better to have a description of the attitude object than to know how someone else felt about it (“I know better than others”), better to know how a friend felt about it than how a stranger felt (“birds of a feather”), and better to get advice from friends—how much they think we will like it—than to know how they felt about it (“my friends know me”). We present evidence that people endorse these lay theories but also that they overuse them. Sometimes people make better predictions by knowing how a stranger felt than by getting a description of the object, sometimes a stranger is as good as a friend, and sometimes advice is not any better than knowing how someone else felt.