The moderating role of social desirability, age, and experience in human judgment: Just how indirect is policy capturing?

Abstract

As policy capturing is becoming a popular methodology both in human judgment research and in publicly debated issues (e.g., Comparable Worth), it is important to assess the relative susceptibility of this and other methods to biases due to individual differences. The present study examined the moderating role of raters' social desirability (SD), age, and experience on the correspondence of judgments obtained via three methods. Industrial recruiters evaluated applicant profiles in a policy capturing task (Policy) and assigned weights to applicant attributes to reflect their importance to themselves (Self) and to others (Others). Overall judgments were predicted using the weights obtained from each task. Three judgment correspondence indices were generated by correlating predicted judgments from each pair of methods. Each of the indices was then regressed on recruiters' SD, age, experience, and their two- and three-way interactions. Results showed that the relationship of SD with judgment correspondence was nonuniform across raters' age and experience in the Policy-Self and Self-Others indexes. Analysis of the Policy-Self index in particular provided a profile of judges whose judgments via these two methods were similar and positively associated with their desire to be socially acceptable. Inferences about the susceptibility of policy capturing to SD response bias and theoretical and practical implications of these inferences are discussed.