People's Strategies for Testing Hypotheses about Another's Personality: Confirmatory or Diagnostic?

Abstract

The present paper reports two studies on information-gathering strategies that people use in testing hypotheses about another's personality. Subjects chose interview questions while planning to test the hypothesis that the respondent is an extravert (or an introvert). They could choose from a list of questions that asked about either the hypothesized trait or the alternative trait and that were of either low or high diagnostic value in discriminating between extraverts and introverts. Subjects' preferences were studied under three conditions varying in the relative salience of the hypothesis and the alternative. Specifically, subjects received a description of either (1) the hypothesized trait, (2) the alternative trait, or (3) both the hypothesized and the alternative traits. Preference for questions about the hypothesized trait was limited to the condition where only the hypothesized trait was described. High-diagnosticity questions were preferred to low-diagnosticity questions in all conditions.