The effect of individual differences of cognitive style on judgments of document relevance

The possibility that the relevance decision may be affected by individual differences in openness to information is examined. Openness to information is operationally defined by a series of cognitive style variables (openmindedness, rigidity, category width, locus of control, anxiety, and defensiveness). A multiple‐regression technique was utilized to simultaneously test the effect of cognitive variables and previously tested variables tapping judges' interest and expertise in the problem area. Subjects made relevance decisions on a randomly generated list of citations for a question provided by the experimenter. Divergent behavior on the dependent variable (number of citations deemed relevant) by two groups of subjects necessitated splitting the initial sample of 48 into two independent groups of 25 and 23. The pattern of the empirical results conforms to the prediction that approximately 30% of the relevance‐decision variance is attributable to variables tapping openness to information. The empirical results do not reach the normative criterion of α = 0.05. It is argued that this finding is due to a decrease in power resulting from the decrease in sample size rather than from an inadequate or erroneous model. The results are discussed in terms of the relationship between information systems and the “epistemic who”.