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Related Experiment Videos

Clever hands: uncontrolled intelligence in facilitated communication.

Daniel M Wegner1, Valerie A Fuller, Betsy Sparrow

  • 1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. wegner@wjh.harvard.edu

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|July 23, 2003
PubMed
Summary

People answering questions for others often use their own knowledge, not the other person's. Even with incentives, accuracy remained low, suggesting a bias in attributing answers.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Individuals may answer questions on behalf of others.
  • The accuracy and attribution of these proxy answers are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether individuals answering for others rely on their own knowledge.
  • To examine the accuracy of proxy answering under various conditions.
  • To explore how authorship of answers is attributed in proxy answering scenarios.

Main Methods:

  • Five experiments were conducted involving participants answering yes/no questions.
  • Participants were instructed to answer randomly, sense ostensible keyboard movements, or detect unvoiced inclinations of a confederate.
  • Confederates were instructed not to answer and did not receive the questions.

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Main Results:

  • Participants instructed to answer randomly were more accurate on easy than hard questions.
  • Accuracy did not improve with increased opportunity or incentives.
  • Participants exhibited similar correctness when sensing confederate cues, despite the confederate not knowing the questions.
  • Answers were frequently attributed to the confederate.

Conclusions:

  • Individuals may default to using their own knowledge when answering for others.
  • Proxy answering accuracy is limited, particularly for difficult questions.
  • The attribution of answers to another person can occur even when the proxy is the source of information.