Effects of differing types of information upon clinical judgments.

Abstract

Three groups of ten professional psychologists were provided with differing types of information about an actual counseling client: one group received minimal, or stereotype, information about the client (Stereotype Group); a second group received minimal information and viewed videotaped excerpts from a counseling session with the client (Stereotype-Video Group); and a third received both of these types of information plus test protocols from a standard test battery administered to the client (Stereotype-Video-Diagnostics Group). All subjects then made a number of clinical judgments about the client. These included: (1) predicting how the client described herself on a personality checklist (Predictive Task), (2) evaluating the client on a number of clinical dimensions (Evaluative Task), and (3) diagnosis of the client. Judges were also asked to rate their confidence in the accuracy of each judgment made.

It was concluded that type of information may have complex differential effects upon different types of clinical judgments.

No significant effect of type of information upon accuracy in performance of either the Predictive or Evaluative Tasks was obtained. Type of information did appear to have an effect upon diagnosis of the client and upon confidence in judgments. Type of information was found to have a significant effect upon the extent to which judges relied upon assumed similarity in predicting how the client saw herself.