Biased Information Search in the Interpersonal Domain

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate the conditions under which people selectively seek information about other persons to provide an informational basis for desired positive or negative evaluations of those persons. It was hypothesized that active involvement in an interaction with another person is prerequisite to the occurrence of such biased search. Subjects either received or observed another subject receive a positive or negative evaluation from a confederate. After being led to expect that available information about the confederate was either mostly positive or mostly negative, their interest in acquiring such information was assessed. Subjects who were the recipients of the confederate's praise sought more information when they expected it to be positive than when they expected it to be negative; recipients of the confederate's criticism sought more information when they expected it to be negative than when they expected it to be positive. No hint of such biased search tendencies were found among observer subjects.

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