Ramadhar Singh, Distinguished Professor of Management at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, featured in a book entitled Most Underappreciated: 50 Prominent Social Psychologists Describe Their Most Unloved Work (The Oxford University Press, New York, 2011). The Editor, Professor Robert M. Arkin of The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA, called the contributors the "North Stars" who describe how their one very important piece of research had gone unnoticed, unappreciated, or misquoted in social psychology. Each essay, a personal recollection of an established social psychologist's labor of love, is intended to educate young scholars how to navigate the ebb-and-flow of the professional journey they have undertaken.
Singh's essay on Imputing Values to Missing Information in Social Judgment describes his 15-year ofexperimentation at IIT, Kanpur and IIM, Ahmedabad and published from the National University of Singapore in Norman H. Anderson's Contributions to Information Integration Theory: Vol. II: Social (Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1991). Singh studied how people infer missing information from information given in decision making. For making judgments of gift size, for example, people need information about both the generosity and income of the donors. Information about either generosity or income is logically insufficient. If people do make judgments about gift size, it means that they imputed some value to the missing information. Singh first showed that the cognitive algebra for judgment of gift size is Gift size = Generosity x Income. Given the repeated support for a multiplicative model, he further demonstrated that the missing generosity information is imputed a fixed value, but that the imputed value to the missing income information increases with the increasing value of the generosity information given.
Anderson acclaimed Singh's work as the tour de force in cognitive psychology; to Singh's regret, however, this work did not get as much citations as did his other publications. Nevertheless, diagnosing the asymmetry in patterns of imputations about missing generosity (or motivation) and income (or ability) was a "truly enjoyable puzzle" for Singh that shaped his scientific thinking and the methodological rigour that he has been maintaining even today.
Ramadhar Singh, Distinguished Professor of Management at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, featured in a book entitled Most Underappreciated: 50 Prominent Social Psychologists Describe Their Most Unloved Work (The Oxford University Press, New York, 2011). The Editor, Professor Robert M. Arkin of The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA, called the contributors the "North Stars" who describe how their one very important piece of research had gone unnoticed, unappreciated, or misquoted in social psychology. Each essay, a personal recollection of an established social psychologist's labor of love, is intended to educate young scholars how to navigate the ebb-and-flow of the professional journey they have undertaken.
Singh's essay on Imputing Values to Missing Information in Social Judgment describes his 15-year ofexperimentation at IIT, Kanpur and IIM, Ahmedabad and published from the National University of Singapore in Norman H. Anderson's Contributions to Information Integration Theory: Vol. II: Social (Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1991). Singh studied how people infer missing information from information given in decision making. For making judgments of gift size, for example, people need information about both the generosity and income of the donors. Information about either generosity or income is logically insufficient. If people do make judgments about gift size, it means that they imputed some value to the missing information. Singh first showed that the cognitive algebra for judgment of gift size is Gift size = Generosity x Income. Given the repeated support for a multiplicative model, he further demonstrated that the missing generosity information is imputed a fixed value, but that the imputed value to the missing income information increases with the increasing value of the generosity information given.
Anderson acclaimed Singh's work as the tour de force in cognitive psychology; to Singh's regret, however, this work did not get as much citations as did his other publications. Nevertheless, diagnosing the asymmetry in patterns of imputations about missing generosity (or motivation) and income (or ability) was a "truly enjoyable puzzle" for Singh that shaped his scientific thinking and the methodological rigour that he has been maintaining even today.