How do we judge others’ behavior when they are both seen and not seen—when we observe their behavior but not the underlying traits or history that moderate the perceived riskiness of their behavior? We investigate this question in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: How people make sense of, and judge, vaccination-contingent behaviors—behaviors, such as going to the gym or a bar, which are considered to be more or less risky and appropriate, depending on the target’s vaccination status. While decision theoretic models suggest that these judgments should depend on the probability that the target is vaccinated (e.g., the positivity of judgments should increase linearly with the probability of vaccination), in a large-scale pre-registered experiment (N = 936) we find that both riskiness and appropriateness judgments deviate substantially from such normative benchmarks. Specifically, when participants judge a stranger’s behavior, without being asked to think about the stranger’s vaccination status, they tend to judge these behaviors similarly positively to behaviors of others who are known to be fully vaccinated. By contrast, when participants are explicitly prompted to think about the vaccination status of others, they do so, leading them to view others more disparagingly, at times even more negatively than what a normative benchmark would imply. More broadly, these results suggest new directions for research on how people respond to risk and ambiguity. We demonstrate that even subtle cues can fundamentally alter what information is “top of mind,” that is, what information is included or excluded when making judgments.

我们如何判断他人的行为，当他们既被看见又被看不见时——当我们观察他们的行为而不是缓和他们行为的感知风险的潜在特征或历史时？我们在 COVID-19 大流行的背景下调查了这个问题：人们如何理解和判断疫苗接种相关行为——例如去健身房或酒吧，这些行为被认为或多或少有风险，适当的，取决于目标的疫苗接种状态。虽然决策理论模型表明这些判断应取决于目标接种疫苗的概率（例如，判断的积极性应随接种概率线性增加），但在大规模预注册实验中（N= 936) 我们发现风险和适当性判断都与这些规范基准有很大的偏差。具体来说，当参与者判断一个陌生人的行为时，没有被要求考虑陌生人的疫苗接种状况，他们倾向于对这些行为做出与其他已知行为类似的积极判断全面接种疫苗。相比之下，当参与者被明确提示考虑其他人的疫苗接种状况时，他们会这样做，导致他们更加轻视他人，有时甚至比规范基准所暗示的更加消极。更广泛地说，这些结果为研究人们如何应对风险和不确定性提出了新的方向。我们证明，即使是微妙的线索也可以从根本上改变“最重要的”信息，即在做出判断时包含或排除哪些信息。