Psychological‐mindedness as “reading between the lines”: Vigilance, locus of control, and sagacious judgment

Abstract

Abstract Based on Scheibe's (1979) concept of sagacity, the first purpose of this research was to assess the role of vigilance in a judgment task wherein subjects “read between the lines” of target persons' word associations Second, on the basis of the locus of control and cue expectation literature, we tested the prediction that internals would be more successful judges than would externals only when a vigilant strategy was not emphasized in the task instructions In keeping with the first prediction, judges who used the vigilant strategy of circling what they thought to be clues did significantly better on the judgment task and on a post‐judgment clue awareness task However, the results provided no support for the predicted interaction of instructions and locus of control These null findings emerged in a conceptual replication using a different version of the judgment task and a different form of cue explication In both studies, externals did significantly better than did internals on the clue awareness task Finally, a supplementary study tested whether good‐ and poor‐vigilant judges processed different clues in the judgment task Analyses of the clues circled while making judgments revealed that, relative to poor judges, good judges more often selected the most important clue in the task, and the discrepancy between good and poor judges increased over trials of the task Together with previous studies, the results provide strong support for conceptualizing the judgment task in terms of Scheibe's concept of sagacity.

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