Social perceivers seek to understand the opportunities and threats others potentially afford—for example, whether a teammate will behave tenaciously or a romantic partner, faithfully. We typically detect affordances and draw trait inferences by observing behaviors that reveal or predict others’ likely intentions and characteristics. However, detection and inference from simple observation are often difficult (e.g., even dishonest people are frequently honest, people often mask unpopular beliefs). In such cases, we propose that people test, actively manipulating others’ circumstances to reveal hard-to-observe affordances and characteristics. The Observation-Testing Model is a framework predicting circumstances under which testing is more likely to happen, which affordances and characteristics are more likely to be tested for, and which people are more likely to test and be tested. We identify preliminary support for the model from a range of literatures (e.g., employment assessment, coming-of-age rituals, dating processes) and identify areas needing further research.

社会感知者试图了解其他人可能提供的机会和威胁——例如，一个队友是否会表现得很顽强，或者一个浪漫的伴侣是否会忠诚。我们通常通过观察揭示或预测他人可能的意图和特征的行为来检测可供性并得出特征推断。然而，从简单的观察中检测和推断通常是困难的（例如，即使是不诚实的人也经常是诚实的，人们经常掩盖不受欢迎的信念）。在这种情况下，我们建议人们进行测试，积极操纵他人的情况，以揭示难以观察到的可供性和特征。观察测试模型是一个框架，它预测测试更有可能发生的环境，哪些可供性和特征更有可能被测试，以及哪些人更有可能进行测试和被测试。我们从一系列文献（例如，就业评估、成年仪式、约会过程）中确定了对该模型的初步支持，并确定了需要进一步研究的领域。