The use of subjective experience in the prediction of others' behavior

Abstract

The present research investigated the role of experienced ease of retrieval in predicting future behavior of others. People retrieve past examples of others' behavior to predict how they would behave in the future. But well-defined, high trait evaluations about others decrease the informational value of the retrieved content. In this case, people may base their predictions on the ease or difficulty which they experienced during the retrieval of examples. In two experiments, participants were asked to think of an acquaintance who they evaluated as being assertive or less assertive. The trait evaluations were manipulated by using different experimental instructions (Experiment 1) or using measured trait evaluation scores (Experiment 2). Then, participants retrieved one (easy) or four (difficult) past examples of the acquaintance's behavior. In the case of an assertive acquaintance, participants predicted a higher likelihood of assertive behaviors after retrieving one example than after retrieving four examples, whereas in the case of a less assertive acquaintance the reverse was true. These results suggest that subjective experiences can have informational value even when making predictions of others' future behavior.