Confirmation Bias as a Social Skill

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.

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