Selecting information on job content or job context: The moderating effect of one's own epistemic authority

The study investigated the effect of self-ascribed epistemic authority (SAEA) on proclivity to choose information either about job content or about job context. Subjects expressed their attitudes toward a job offer on the basis of information either about job content alone or about job content and job context. It was found that in the process of evaluating a job offer, people with different levels of SAEA tended to focus on different kinds of information-job-content or job-context characteristics. The higher the SAEA, the greater was the effect of job-content characteristics on their evaluation of the job offer. By contrast, when the job-content characteristics were supplemented with attractive job-context characteristics, the relationship between SAEA and job-offer evaluation was low and insignificant. Subjects low on SAEA had relatively low preference for using job-content characteristics as criteria for job-offer evaluation.