ABSTRACT
At the end of a recently held seminar on the topic of this volume, social hypothesis testing, some ambitious students confessed that they had been initially threatened by the seminar announcement, expecting mainly formal statistics and methodology. Although they learned, later on, that models borrowed from statistics were indeed not irrelevant, they nevertheless discovered an extremely exciting topic behind the title. Research on social hypothesis testing is at the heart of many intriguing phenomena that have occupied scholars in social psychology, cognitive psychology, and decision making for many decades. It tells stories about cognitive fallacies and shortcomings, collective illusions, and sources of stereotypes and superstition, but also stories about adaptive cognition and amazing subtleties of information processing and communication.
