Confirmation Bias as a Social Skill
Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: The authors propose that when testing a hypothesis about a personality trait of another person, a preference for questions that match the hypothesis is a manifestation of a social skill. If so, socially skilled people should request matching questions when the context stresses their relevance. On the contrary, less skilled people should be relatively insensitive to this environmental cue. To test this pragmatic stance, participants varying in self-monitoring sought information to validate an introvert or an extrovert hypothesis concerning a high-or equal-status interviewee. As predicted, only high self-monitors in the high-status-interviewee context showed a preference for matching questions. Moreover, the preference was stronger for not rejecting than for accepting these matching questions. Results are discussed in light of a pragmatic perspective that points out the adaptive and socially useful value of what look like errors and biases from a strictly rationalist perspective.
Authors: Benoit Dardenne, Jacques-Philippe Leyens
Institutions: Fund for Scientific Research, UCLouvain
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2166809159