Contextual Effects in Hypothesis Testing: The Role of Competing Alternatives and Epistemic Motivations

Two experiments were executed to study how persons test hypotheses about others. Experiment 1 demonstrated that subjects can be sensitive to contextually presented alternatives to a given hypothesis. Subjects who addressed the hypotheses that an interviewee was an architect or a painter selected different information than did those who addressed the hypotheses that the interviewee was an architect or a computer engineer. In both cases, subjects' informational choices appeared guided by the principle of diagnosticity. Notably, they predominantly selected information whose diagnostic value with respect to the pertinent hypothesis-alternative pair was high rather than low. Experiment 2 demonstrated that subjects' sensitivity to a contextually mentioned alternative (architect) to a given target hypothesis (painter) may be affected by their motivational orientation. Subjects with a high need for openness (as manipulated by high fear of invalidity) and low need for closure were more likely to seek diagnostic in...