Personal Involvement and Strategies for Making Contingency Judgments. A Stake in the Dating Game Makes a Difference

To examine the relation between degree of involvement in a task and the complexity of strategy a subject applies to the task, we randomly assigned 48 female university volunteers to either a dating condition (high-involvement) or one of two (low-involvement) control conditions. These subjects performed a covariation judgment task for which the likelihood of their using simple or complex strategies was calculated. High-involvement subjects used more complex strategies and tended to be more accurate. These data are discussed in terms of the functionality of human information processing, heuristic analyses of inference strategies, and the importance of considering level of personal involvement in analyses of task performance.