Assessing Influences on One's Own Judgments: Is There Greater Accuracy for Either Subjectively Important or Objectively Influential Variables?

Abstract

This research examined whether people have privileged knowledge of influences on their own judgments and whether either the subjective importance or the objective strength of these influences affects the accuracy of people's self-reports. Forty subjects rated people they knew on ten life-situation variables and then judged each person's happiness. Actors then assessed the relationship between each variable and their happiness judgments. Subjective importance was manipulated by yoking pairs of actors so that both worked with the same variables, which one actor had previously chosen as subjectively important and the other actor had not. To examine whether actors' self-reports were more accurate for influential than noninfluential variables, we used a new accuracy measure that allowed us to look at within-subject relationships between each variable's influence and the actor's accuracy for that variable. Neither the subjective importance nor the objective influence of the variables affected the accuracy of actors' self-reports. A control group of 24 observers received a brief description of the actors' task and then guessed how actors would think their judgments were related to each variable. Actor-observer comparisons, in conjunction with other analyses we performed, indicated that actors based their self-reports at least partly on private information and that this information did in fact cause their reports to be more accurate than those of observers.