Confirmatory Search Strategies in Social Interaction: How, When, Why, and With What Consequences

Recent research has suggested that people test their beliefs about other individuals by behaviorally searching for evidence that confirms these beliefs. This report focuses on the nature and generalizability of this confirmatory search strategy. Experiment 1 supported the generality of the confirmatory search strategy by showing that people generated confirmatory search strategies spontaneously, and did so whether probing for evidence pertaining to dominance—submissiveness or extraversion-introversion. Experiment 2 indicated that perceivers who were highly uncertain of their beliefs tended to search for a mixture of confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence, using search strategies that were unlikely to constrain the responses of targets. In contrast, perceivers who were certain of their beliefs displayed a clear preference for belief-confirmatory evidence and solicited such evidence utilizing highly constraining search strategies. Finally, Experiment 3 indicated that simply entertaining a belief raised the perceived diagnosticity of evidence that promised to support that belief. This questions the utility of contending that people prefer diagnostic information over confirmatory information, since they are often one and the same in the eyes of perceivers. We conclude that there is a fairly pervasive, cognitively based tendency for people to solicit support for their social beliefs, but that the character and interpersonal consequences of such efforts vary as a function of several identifiable parameters.