Social Hypothesis Testing and the Role of Expertise

Abstract

Research on social hypothesis-testing processes has demonstrated that there is a strong preference for seeking and using hypothesis-confirming evidence when testing hypotheses about other people. An experiment was conducted to examine the extent to which expertise in a particular knowledge domain represents a delimiting condition of this inferential tendency. Expert and novice subjects completed a hypothesis-testing recall task. Recall differences in line with the different strategies commonly used by experts and novices on problem-solving and reasoning tasks were predicted. As expected, novices recalled more hypothesis-matching evidence after a delay interval, regardless of the nature of the hypothesis to be tested. Expert recall, by contrast, was not characterized by this confirmatory preference when experts tested the hypothesis inside their domain of expertise. The extent to which these expert/novice differences provide support for motivated social cognition is discussed.