ABSTRACT
In the course of social relationships, individuals often attempt to make judgments about the personal attributes of other people. A series of empirical investigations have examined the strategies that individuals formulate to test hypotheses about other people with whom they anticipate social interaction. Hypotheses differ in their origins. Some hypotheses emerge from more credible sources than do others. The origins of the hypothesis being tested had no noticeable effect on the questioning strategy that individuals adopted to test their hypotheses. Even in the face of competing hypotheses, individuals plan to preferentially solicit evidence whose presence would tend to confirm only one of the competing hypotheses. Time and again, investigations of strategies for testing hypotheses about other people have yielded the same outcome. Confirmatory hypothesis-testing strategies and their consequences are not confined to the domain of hypotheses about the personal attributes of other people.
