Confirmatory bias in hypothesis testing for client-identified and counselor self-generated hypotheses.

Abstract

Hypothesis testing strategies exhibited by 65 counseling trainees were assessed after the trainees viewed and responded to a videotaped client-counselor interaction. Participants' hypothesis testing strategies were assessed for both a client-identified (experimenter-provided) and a counselor self-generated hypothesis about the client's problem. Results for the client-identified hypotheses failed to support either the previous finding of a strong neutral hypothesis testing strategy (e.g., D. C. Hayden, 1987;D. C. Strohmer & A. L. Chiodo, 1984) or the predicted confirmatory bias. Results for the self-generated hypotheses did reveal a strong confirmatory tendency across 5 analogue interviewing behaviors-with mean response percentages of 64% confirmatory, 21% neutral, and 15% disconfirmatory-and contradict prior research indicating that counselors do not exhibit a confirmatory bias in hypothesis testing.The counseling trainee who meets a new client is faced with a complex, highly ambiguous task in attempting to discern that client's problem. For the counselor, problem identification is an inferential task that involves drawing on current knowledge and intuition in generating and then testing a hypothesis about a client's concern. As Leary and Miller (1986) pointed out, Counselors are not simply the passive recipients of whatever information their clients wish to divulge. Rather, they actively seek information, integrate that information to form ideas about the client and his or her dysfunction, and seek to test their hunches by gathering new information, (p. 135)Research in social psychology has found that inferential decisions are frequently characterized by systematic error. Work by Snyder and his colleagues (Snyder & Campbell, 1980;Snyder, Campbell, & Preston, 1982;Snyder & Swann, 1978;Swann & Giuliano, 1987) has demonstrated that people are susceptible to a confirmatory bias in gathering information to test their hunches, or hypotheses, about others. Confirmatory bias is one of three hypothesis testing strategies that may characterize a perceiver's information search (Pepinsky & Pepinsky, 1954;Popper, 1959) and can be defined as a search for information that is consistent with the This article is based on Beth E. Haverkamp's doctoral dissertation, completed under the supervision of Jo-Ida C. Hansen at the

Psychologists’ Diagnostic Processes during a Diagnostic Interview

“…Alternative diagnostic classifications did not seem to be discussed or considered very often in any part of the interview. Considering few alternative diagnostic classifications is consistent with results from previous studies on psychiatric diagnoses (Garb, 1998;Haverkamp, 1993). An explanation could be that psychologists "satisfice" (Simon, 1957): as soon as they find a classification that sufficiently describes the client's condition and differentiates between treatments, they choose that classification and stop searching.…”

Decision Confidence, Information Usefulness, and Information Seeking Intention in the Presence of Disconfirming Information

“…Evidence for the existence of the confirmatory bias phenomenon is supported in the psychology literature (Bruner & Potter, 1964;Darley & Gross, 1983;Haverkamp, 1993;Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979;Pious, 1991). Our study builds upon Khaneman and Tversky's (1972) seminal research on confirmation bias, extending it into the modern data visualizations that clients now commonly view in the 21 st -century informing environment.…”

Refusing to budge: a confirmatory bias in decision making?

“…While it is, at heart, an informational processing problem, confirmatory bias cannot be dismissed as a transaction cost problem in light of its nonsymmetric nature; confirmatory evidence is kept and processed, regardless of the difficulties in digesting and translating such information into a coherent framework, while disconfirmatory evidence, however simplistic, is summarily misread and often disregarded. 2 Psychological evidence for the existence of the confirmatory bias phenomenon is abundant (Bruner and Potter 1964;Lord et al 1979;Plous 1991;Darley and Gross 1983;Haverkamp 1993;Dougherty et al 1994;Strohmer and Shivy 1994;Snyder and Swann 1978;Swann and Snyder 1980;Miller et al 1993;Nickerson 1998), but aside from Rabin and Schrag's (1999) theoretical modeling of the bias in an economic methodological framework, there has been little empirical or experimental testing of the concept geared towards an economic setting. 3,4 This paper is an attempt to address that oversight.…”