On penetrating the "mask": the role of sagacity and acumen in a word-association/clinical-judgment task.

The present study addressed aspects of Scheibe's (1979) description of the psychologist's modes of knowing another, specifically sagacity and acumen, as they applied to a videotaped clinical judgment task. The judgment task was patterned after classic research on the word-association lie-detection paradigm. Measures of empathy, understanding of defense mechanisms, and game strategy served as marker variables for the construct of acumen, whereas a task requiring alertness and attention served this purpose for the construct of sagacity. Sagacity also was inferred from correlations between performance on the judgment task and self-rated use of the most critical cue provided in the task. The judgment task was administered following an induction to create an empathic or a detached set. Success at the task correlated significantly in a positive direction with the measure of attention and with subjects' ratings of their use of word associations (but not other clues). Empathy and game strategy tended to relate inversely or nonsignificantly with the judgment task, and the two inductions produced virtually identical levels of performance on the task. The results are taken as evidence that the judgment task involves the mode of sagacity but not that of acumen.