Social Judgement Theory

The “Overton Window,” also called the “Window of Discourse,” is a mental model that delineates what’s broadly acceptable and unacceptable within a community.

It’s a rough map of the socially okay and not okay, basically, and what falls within this window indicates what sorts of jokes are okay to tell, what sorts of political ideas are okay to hold, and what sorts of wars it’s okay to fight.

This window shifts over time, and you might have a majority of people say that gay marriage isn’t okay during one span of time, but then just a handful of years later the majority approves of gay marriage.

It’s roughly the same group of people (some will have died and some will have been born during that intervening period), but something happened to shift the Overton Window on that specific topic, and now it’s maybe weird to think gay marriage isn’t okay, and that belief (not supporting gay marriage) has moved mainstream, socially approved consideration.

A similar, window of acceptability model is used to illustrate the concept of “Social Judgement Theory,” which posits that our response to new ideas is moderated by a subconscious comparison of that idea to existing social attitudes.

We’re presented with a concept, that gay marriage is okay, for instance, and our brains churn through what we know about what’s allowed and what’s not, what’s considered to be good and bad by the majority of people we know (and know of), and that new (to us) idea is then (metaphorically) plotted on an Overton Window-like chart, with acceptable ideas in the middle, rejectable ideas on the furthest left and right extremes, and what’s called the “Latitude of Non-Commitment” serving as a buffer between the acceptable middle and unacceptable fringes.

The Latitude of Non-Commitment is where we plot ideas that don’t fall squarely in the okay or not-okay category, according to our understanding of things, at least. And the placement of these zones is based on our anchor: our sense of what the majority thinks is good and correct, what they think is bad and not-okay, and thus, where we plot ourselves, right in the middle of that “this is what’s good and correct” window.

This anchor and its associated zones inform our perception of new ideas we encounter, but also new people and their ideas. Are they good people? Bad people? Neutral people? Our anchors help us quickly categorize them based on what we seem to know about their beliefs, and where those beliefs fall on our personal, window-like diagram.

This theory is emerged from a bunch of research that suggested subjects were heavily influenced by belief anchors when assessing new information and ideas, and while they were less likely to strongly respond to concepts that fell into their Latitude of Non-Commitment, they were more likely to knee-jerk accept things that seemed to fall into their central, acceptable area (the “Latitude of Acceptance”) and more likely to knee-jerk reject things that seemed to fall along those outer extremes (the “Latitude of Rejection”).

Research in this space has also suggested that many of us take extreme stands on certain issues because of what’s called “Ego Involvement.”

We incorporate our stands on certain issues into our mental model of who we are as people, and that makes it very difficult to change our minds about these things, even when doing so might be justified.

With some issues that are close to our sense of personal definition, then (religion or politics, perhaps), our bands of Latitude Rejection for alternative or opposing concepts might be huge, and thus we’re more likely to reflexively dismiss anything that even comes close to maybe, possibly challenging our default sense of these things.

All of which is interesting and potentially useful because it gestures at how individuals may passively incorporate general social sentiments into their own sense of self (and their own understanding of what they believe, support, reject, etc), but it also points at how people might be persuaded of things that they currently reject, and how individual attitudes, predicated on broad social movements, might be changed over time by shifting the average anchoring point of a person’s community.