Abstract
We conducted a psychological study to examine vague judgments in social and perceptual tasks. Two hundred and fifty-two subjects were randomly divided into three groups of roughly equal size. Group 1 was told to make an accurate estimate while group 2 was told to make a vague/rough estimate and group 3 was told to make an estimate with a fuzzy rating method. The results indicated that participants told to estimate with accuracy were better than those with vague condition for two of the perceptual tasks (square area and length of vertical line) but were not significantly different for three of the perceptual tasks (number of dots and length of horizontal line). We also found that participants in the vague condition were more accurate than the accuracy condition for one social task (number of suicides per year), but not significantly different for 2 of the social tasks (number of marriages per year and height of Mt. Fuji). The results suggested that vague judgment was accurate and adaptive strategy in some situations.
