On penetrating the "mask": The role of sagacity and acumen in a word-association/clinical-judgment task.

Abstract

The present study addressed aspects of Scheibe's (1979) description of the psychologist's modes of knowing another, specifically sagacity and acumen, as they applied to a videotaped clinical judgment task. The judgment task was patterned after classic research on the word-association lie-detection paradigm. Measures of empathy, understanding of defense mechanisms, and game strategy served as marker variables for the construct of acumen, whereas a task requiring alertness and attention served this purpose for the construct of sagacity. Sagacity also was inferred from correlations between performance on the judgment task and self-rated use of the most critical cue provided in the task. The judgment task was administered following an induction to create an empathic or a detached set. Success at the task correlated significantly in a positive direction with the measure of attention and with subjects' ratings of their use of word associations (but not other clues). Empathy and game strategy tended to relate inversely or nonsignificantly with the judgment task, and the two inductions produced virtually identical levels of performance on the task. The results are taken as evidence that the judgment task involves the mode of sagacity but not that of acumen.

Psychological‐mindedness as “reading between the lines”: Vigilance, locus of control, and sagacious judgment

“…The results also showed that strategy use interacted with knowledge of clues Subjects who did not use the strategy and who made many errors on the clue awareness task did quite poorly at the judgment task While this finding tends to imply that knowledge and vigilance are both sufficient for success (rather than both being necessary), the supplementary study showed that the most vigilant judges could be split into very competent and incompetent subgroups Moreover good judges were more hkely to have used valid clues plus a number of subtle idiosyncratic thief clues suggestive of guilty knowledge on the part of the thief Perhaps the most impressive evidence came from the difference between good and poor judges on a clue (pizza/parlor) that was highly diagnostic in both a qualitative and quantitative sense While poor judges consistently failed to recognize the significance of this clue, good judges seemed to use it more frequently over several tnals and then to take it for granted Hence the difference between good and poor judges (expressed as a phi coefficient) increased over five of the six appearances of this clue While good judges used clues suggestive of guilty knowledge, poor judges circled clues that were contradiagnostic of thieves Such a strategy would be appropriate for a "scientifically oriented" judge who wanted to proceed by first excluding "innocent" foils However, most people seem to use confirmatory strategies in testing hypotheses about others (Snyder & Campbell, 1980) So if we assume that good and poor judges sought to confirm their tentative hypotheses while circling clues, the poor judges' choice of contradiagnostic clues would account for their poor performance In effect they were taking "signs of innocence" to signify guilt This interpretation is consistent with other results m the study, specifically the finding that subjects high in knowledge (low m clue errors) attained higher hit rates There is one further explanation for the inaccuracy of the poor judges Recall that a majonty of poor judges circled the guilty/ innocent foil clue (see Table 4) while good judges did not The response "innocent" proved to be the modal reply to "guilty" for both thieves and foils (and observant judges should have recognized this) It IS possible, however, that poor judges attempted to read too much into suspects' answers, assuming that the guilty party would attempt to cover his or her innocence Conceivably, then, the poor judges outsmarted themselves by trying to be too sophisticated A similar finding occurred in a previous study where hit rate on the task correlated negatively with self-reported use of all clues in combination (Dollinger & Riger, 1984) An intriguing problem for future study is to distinguish between the judges who are merely slow to recognize implications and those who recognize significant information but overinterpret it by trying to be "too configural" in their thinking…”

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Based on Scheibe's (1979) concept of sagacity, the first purpose of this research was to assess the role of vigilance in a judgment task wherein subjects "read between the lines" of target persons' word associations Second, on the basis of the locus of control and cue explication literature, we tested the prediction that internals would be more successful judges than would externals only when a vigilant strategy was not emphasized in the task instructions In keeping with the first prediction, judges who used the vigilant strategy of circling what they thought to be clues did significantly better on the judgment task and on a postjudgment clue awareness task However, the results provided no support for the predicted interaction of instructions and locus of control These null findings emerged m a conceptual replication using a difFerent version of the judgment task and a different form of cue exphcation In both studies, externals did significantly better than did internals on the clue awareness task Finally, a supplementary study tested whether good-and poor-vigilant judges processed different clues in the judgment task Analyses of the clues circled while making judgments revealed that, relative to poor judges, good judges more often selected the most important clue in the task, and the discrepancy between good and poor judges increased over trials of the task Together with previous studies, the results provide strong support for conceptualizing the judgment task in terms of Scheibe's concept of sagacity Implicit in the enterprise of psychological research is the assumption that the causes of behavior often are not obvious Careful study and controlled investigation are necessary because the ways in which people think and act often have hidden influences Taking this logic one step further, we might assert that, if there is such a thing as Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to S J Dollinger, Ddlingeretal "psychological-mmdedness," it would seem to involve the ability "to read between the lines of behavior "'One recent senes of studies has focussed on this ability to read between the lines in the context of a word-association clinicaljudgment task (Dollinger, Reader, Marnett, & Tylenda, 1983, Dollinger & Riger, 1984 In this task, subjects attempt to identify which of three "suspects" has imagined the commission of a theft In the videotape version of the task, they can make their judgments by recognizing the implications of suspects' word associations, facial expressions, and reaction times to vanous critical and noncntical stimulus words For the paper-and-pencil version of the task, judgments are based solely on word associations that are juxtaposed for the three suspects m each of the 10 judgment triads Across a senes of 6 studies, subject-judges have been quite successfiji at "catching the thief" Most samples yielded significantly-better-than-chance judgments as a group, and between 40% and 60% of individual subjects attained more hits than would be expected by chance Much of this work has been grounded in Scheibe's (1978Scheibe's ( , 1979) conceptualization of "the psychologist's prediction modes" (sagacitv, authority, and acumen), and the to-be-predicted person's tools for avoiding prediction (mirrors, masks, lies, and secrets) Scheibe's conceptual categories are particularly apropos in that, by the nature of the task, the suspects are protected by a kind of mask Moreover, they conceal a secret (the scnpt that they imagined performing), and the thief suspects may be motivated to lie about their guilt Finallv, the word association procedure involves reflection of an "image"the response word mirrors the stimulus word in a fi...

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“…One recent senes of studies has focussed on this ability to read between the lines in the context of a word-association clinicaljudgment task (Dollinger, Reader, Marnett, & Tylenda, 1983, Dollinger & Riger, 1984 In this task, subjects attempt to identify which of three "suspects" has imagined the commission of a theft In the videotape version of the task, they can make their judgments by recognizing the implications of suspects' word associations, facial expressions, and reaction times to vanous critical and noncntical stimulus words For the paper-and-pencil version of the task, judgments are based solely on word associations that are juxtaposed for the three suspects m each of the 10 judgment triads Across a senes of 6 studies, subject-judges have been quite successfiji at "catching the thief" Most samples yielded significantly-better-than-chance judgments as a group, and between 40% and 60% of individual subjects attained more hits than would be expected by chance Much of this work has been grounded in Scheibe's (1978Scheibe's ( , 1979) conceptualization of "the psychologist's prediction modes" (sagacitv, authority, and acumen), and the to-be-predicted person's tools for avoiding prediction (mirrors, masks, lies, and secrets) Scheibe's conceptual categories are particularly apropos in that, by the nature of the task, the suspects are protected by a kind of mask Moreover, they conceal a secret (the scnpt that they imagined performing), and the thief suspects may be motivated to lie about their guilt Finallv, the word association procedure involves reflection of an "image"the response word mirrors the stimulus word in a figurative sense Previous work with the task suggests that the prediction mode of sagacity is most relevant to successful performance on the task According to Scheibe (1979), sagacity involves "keen observation combined With interpretive knowledge" (p 19), where that knowledge consists of patterns of consistency between subtle cues and the criterion of interest In other words, sagacity is "the talent for seeing the parts of which things are composed and of picking out for special attention those parts of greatest immediate significance" (Scheibe, 1978, p. 870) Consistent with this notion, success at the judgment task has correlated with measures of "clue awareness"-knowledge of which word-association stimulus-response pairs are significantly diagnostic of thief and foil suspects This effect emerged to varying 1 This viewpoint is not incompatible with the traditional dynamic conception of psychological-mmdedness as insight into one s own conflicts and defenses (e g, Applebaum, 1973^ However, it is broader than the traditional conception, and leaves open the question of whether self-insight and insight into others are correlated…”

“…degrees in two studies that used the videotape version and two using the booklet version of the task (Dollinger, m press) Procedures for training subjects in "what to look for" fared less well Only one of the four studies yielded the predicted effect on judgment success Additional evidence for the relevance of the sagacity mode comes from a finding that self-reported use of word associations (but not other factors) correlated positively with hit rate (Dollinger & Riger, 1984) This IS an important finding because other ostensible cues (e g , facial expressions, reaction times) are not diagnostic of status as a thief or foil (Dollinger, in press, preliminary studies) By definition, sagacity not only involves knowledge of "what to look for" but attention to just those cues Previous studies have only indirectly touched on the vigilance facet of sagacity In one study, judges who did well were more likely to have descnbed themselves previously as alert and clear-thmkmg on an adjective checklist (Dollinger et al , 1983) However, such relationships were not obtained m self-reports of mood using similar adjectives (Dollinger [m press] Experiments 3 and 4) In one other study, judgment success correlated with accurate and efficient performance on a vigilance task (digit cancellation) administered just prior to the judgment task (Dollinger & Riger, 1984) Thus, the evidence suggests that the attentional component of sagacity is relevant to success at reading between the lines in this task However, the evidence is stronger for the knowledge than for the attention component of sagacity Further study of the attentional component provided one purpose of this study In initial work with the booklet version of the task, we observed that some subjects spontaneously used a vigilant strategy of circling word associations presumably because they believed these words to be diagnostic of thief suspects Although the circling of a stimulus or cue is not identical to what is usually called vigilance, it does represent a kind of task-relevant and subject-generated vigilance, so we decided to assess its effectiveness ^ This was done in two ways First, the vigilant strategy was manipulated as an independent variable Some subjects were directed to use the strategy, for others it was suggested, and for a control group, it was not mentioned (We will refer to this variable as "cue explication ") Second, vigilance was measured as a dependent variable, operationalized as the number of judgment triads on which at least one word association was circled It was predicted that increasing use of the strategy-which should take place as a function of the independent vanable-would relate to better hit rates in judgment and better performance on the postjudgment test for awareness of which word clues are valid A second purpose of this research concerned personality correlates of the task Past research found that vanous measures of psychological-mmdedness were unrelated to success at reading between the lines (Dollinger et al, 1983) In addition, an empathic disposition correlated negatively with hit rate (Dollinger & Riger, 1984) These variables were selected for study on the assumption that success required a kind of intuitive apprehension of the target suspects' thought processes-a concept very similar to Scheibe's acumen concept (1978Scheibe's acumen concept ( ,1...…”

Confidence at recognizing psychological implications

“…Authority affords prediction via controlling the reinforcement contingencies in a situation; hence, it is less relevant to the task presently used. A series of studies suggest that the acumen mode is irrelevant to success at the task, but sagacity is quite relevant (Dollinger & Riger, 1984;Dollinger, in press). In particular, this research has shown that word associations but not affect expressions or reaction times provide the critical clue for judgment in this task, and successful judges more commonly report using just word associations.…”