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Abstract

Research on judgment heuristics has shown the importance of context in influencing the information used (and that ignored) in making judgments. The authors tested the hypothesis that personality differences also affect susceptibility to heuristic reasoning processes. Participants scoring high and low on the Sociable scale of the Personality Adjective Checklist were given problems like those used by Kahneman and Tversky to study the representativeness heuristic under experimental conditions that differed in the extent to which contextual cues intended to activate theoretically relevant motives and concerns about approval and rejection were present. Significant differences between sociability groups were found only in a sociability-relevant condition in which the judgment problem dealt with a theme of rejection and abandonment. Results are discussed in terms of the priming of relevant schemas by contextual cues and resulting effects on attentional deployment and judgmental processes.

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Personality and Judgment Heuristics: Contextual and Individual Difference Interactions in Social Judgment

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