Effects of Asymmetric Questions on Impression Formation
A Trade-off Between Evidence Diagnosticity and Frequency
Abstract
When examining social targets, people may ask asymmetric questions, that is, questions for which “yes” and “no” answers are neither equally diagnostic nor equally frequent. The consequences of this information-gathering strategy on impression formation deserve empirical investigation. The present work explored the role played by the trade-off between the diagnosticity and frequency of answers that follow asymmetric questions. In Study 1, participants received answers to symmetric/asymmetric questions on an anonymous social target. In Study 2, participants read answers to a specific symmetric/asymmetric question provided by different group members. Overall, the results of both studies indicate that asymmetric questions had less impact on impressions than did symmetric questions, suggesting that individuals are more sensitive to data frequency than diagnosticity when forming impressions.
References
1984). People’s strategies for testing hypothesis about another’s personality: Confirmatory or diagnostic? Social Cognition, 2, 199–216. doi 10.1521/soco.1984.2.3.199
(2011). Looking for honesty: The primary role of morality (vs. sociability and competence) in information gathering. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 135–143. doi 10.1002/ejsp.744
(2004). Stereotype-biased search and processing of information about group members. Social Cognition, 22, 650–672. doi 10.1521/soco.22.6.650.54818
(2010). Preferences for different questions when testing hypotheses in an abstract task: Positivity does play a role, asymmetry does not. Acta Psychologica, 134, 162–174. doi 10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.01.007
(1995). Confirmation bias as a social skill. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1229–1239. doi 10.1177/01461672952111011
(1990). Diagnostic and confirmation strategies in trait hypothesis testing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 952–963. doi 10.1037/ 0022-3514.58.6.952
(1991). The tricky nature of skewed frequency tables: An information loss account of distinctiveness-based illusory correlations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 24–36. doi 10.1037//0022-3514.60.1.24
(1996). Explaining and simulating judgment biases as an aggregation phenomenon in probabilistic, multiple-cue environments. Psychological Review, 103, 193–214. doi 10.1037//0033-295X.103.1.193
(2004). Stereotyping as inductive hypothesis testing. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
(1980). Attention and weight in person perception: The impact of negative and extreme behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 889–906. doi 10.1037//0022-3514.38.6.889
(1991). Psychology and nothing. American Scientist, 79, 432–443.
(1993). Beyond selecting information: Biases in spontaneous questions and resultant conclusions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 29, 387–407. doi 10.1006/jesp.1993.1018
(1992). Order effects in beliefs updating: The belief-adjustment model. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 1–55. doi 10.1016/0010-0285(92)90002-J
(1996). Resisting change: Information seeking and stereotype change. European Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 799–826. doi 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0992(199609)26:5<799::AID-EJSP796>3.3.CO;2-F
(1995). Varieties of confirmation bias. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 32, 385–418. doi 10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60315-1
(1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94, 211–228. doi 10.1037/0033-295X.94.2.211
(2004). Hypothesis testing and evaluation. In , Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 200–219). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
(2006). Increased sensitivity to differentially diagnostic answers using familiar materials: Implications for confirmation bias. Memory and Cognition, 34, 577–588. doi 10.3758/BF03193581
(2005). Finding useful questions: On Bayesian diagnosticity, probability, impact, and information gain. Psychological Review, 112, 979–999. doi 10.1037/0033-295X.112.4.979
(2008). Toward a rational theory of human information acquisition. In , The probabilistic mind: Prospects for Bayesian cognitive science (pp. 143–163). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
(1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2, 175–220. doi 10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
(1994). A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection. Psychological Review, 101, 608–631.
(2001). Hypothesis-testing behavior. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
(2000). Hypothesis testing as risk behavior with regard to beliefs. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 13, 107–123. doi 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0771 (200001/03)13:1<107::AID-BDM349>3.0.CO;2-P
(2012). Confirming expectations in asymmetric and symmetric social hypothesis testing. Experimental Psychology, 59, 243–250. doi 10.1027/1618-3169/a000149
(2012). New knowledge for old credences: Asymmetric information search about ingroup and outgroup members. British Journal of Social Psychology, 51, 606–625. doi 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2011.02026.x
(1986). Information-gathering processes: Diagnosticity, hypothesis-confirmatory strategies, and perceived hypothesis confirmation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 93–121. doi 10.1016/0022-1031(86)90031-4
(1992). Information selection and use in hypothesis testing: What is a good question, and what is a good answer? Memory and Cognition, 20, 392–405. doi 10.3758/BF03210923
(1978). Hypothesis-testing processes in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 1202–1212. doi 10.1037/0022-3514.36.11.1202
(2006). Decision by sampling. Cognitive Psychology, 53, 1–26. doi 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2005.10.003
(1961). The economics of information. The Journal of Political Economy, 69, 213–225. doi 10.1086/258464
(1961). Thermostatics and thermodynamics: An introduction to energy, information and states of matter, with engineering applications. Princeton, NJ: D. van Nostrand Company.
(1983). Information-gathering strategies in hypothesis-testing. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 560–576. doi 10.1016/0022-1031(83)90016-1
(1996). Social hypothesis-testing: Cognitive and motivational mechanisms. In , Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 239–270). New York: Guilford.
(1997). Looking for truth in all the wrong places? Asymmetric search of individuating information about stereotyped group members. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 229–241. doi 10.1037/0022-3514.73.2.229
(1988). Testing hypothesis about other people: Confirmatory and diagnostic strategies. Communication and Cognition, 21, 179–189.
(1995). Implicit diagnosticity in an information-buying task. How do we use the information that we bring with us to a problem? Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 8, 245–264. doi 10.1002/bdm.3960080403
(1959). The processing of positive and negative information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11, 92–107. doi 10.1080/17470215908416296
(1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 129–140. doi 10.1080/17470216008416717
(1968). Reasoning about a rule. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 273–281. doi 10.1080/14640746808400161
(1991). Requesting information to form an impression: The influence of valence and confirmatory status. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 27, 337–356. doi 10.1016/0022-1031(91)90030-A
(1995). Hypothesis confirmation: The joint effect of positive test strategy and acquiescence response set. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 52–60. doi 10.1037/0022-3514.68.1.52
(