Self-insight, Other-insight, and Their Relation to Interpersonal Conflict

Abstract

The pessimistic conclusion that people have relatively poor insight into the weighting schemes they use when they make holistic judgements has been generally accepted among judgement researchers (e.g. Arkes, 1981; Balke, Hammond, & Meyer, 1973, Brehmer, 1984. The empirical research that supported this generalisation rested on indices of self-insight that were produced directly by the subjects. It was often the case that subjects were unable to correctly name even the single most important factor influencing their decisions, as indicated by a mathematical model of their judgement schemes. Using an alternate method of assessing self-insight, however, Reilly and Doherty (1989, 1992) found that subjects have far better self-insight than previously believed possible. The present paper employed the same methodology to investigate insight into the policy of another person as well as into oneself, and examined the relation of self-insight and other-insight to interpersonal conflict. Subjects were 50 dyads of university students. The results showed that: (1) subjects exhibited the expected high levels of self-insight via the recognition procedure;(2) subjects were able to identify the statistically generated policy of their roommate, thus exhibiting other-insight; (3) the ability to identify one's own policy is somewhat related to the ability to articulate one's own policy-that is, roommates with insight via recognition had higher indices of self-insight as measured by the traditional correlation method; (4) subjects who were able to identify their own policy were more likely to identify their roommate's policy and (5) individuals who possess self-and other-insight had less conflict in their roommate relationships.

Measuring doctors' self-insight into their treatment decisions

“…Like Reilly andDoherty (1989, 1992) and Reilly (1996), we found that participants were able to select their policies at rates signi®cantly greater than chance. There was no dierence in policy-selection performance between stated and tacit policies.…”

“…Of course, each participant's subjective linear model is inferior to the objective model used in a judgement analysis in describing behaviour: the objective weights are obtained from the line of best ®t (Reilly, 1996;Reilly and Doherty, 1992;Slovic and Lichtenstein, 1971). But objective models are also superior when using crossvalidation, i.e.…”

“…But objective models are also superior when using crossvalidation, i.e. predicting judgements on a new data set (Pargament et al, 1995;Reilly andDoherty, 1989, 1992;Roose and Doherty, 1978). A comparison between the ®t of the subjective model and that of the objective model is useful in that a subjective model may be a poor ®t because of the judgement or decision behaviour is not easy to describe.…”

“…Eliciting explicit knowledge through (stimuli prompted) forced-choice tasks might go some way to addressing this disparity. Reilly andDoherty (1989, 1992;Reilly, 1996) asked students to choose the policy they thought was their own from an array of policies. In doing so they essentially used a forced-choice method to elicit explicit knowledge of implicit judgement processes.…”

Eliciting Utilities Using Functional Methodology: People’s Disutilities for the Adverse Outcomes of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

“…In the hundreds of published studies based on the Functional Theory of Cognition [9], people are not asked directly and explicitly to place values on individual things or pieces of information, for people's self-insight is often limited [10]. Instead, these values and the rules used to integrate them are inferred from the judgments the people make about a set of different combinations of the information.…”