In a book aimed to attract an audience of both social and cognitive psychologists, Eiser and Stroebe have put together a detailed monograph exploring models and experiments dealing with the judgment of social and physical objects.A short introductory chapter presents the term 'social judgment' as covering people's judgments of both physical stimuli (when influenced by expectations) and social stimuli (people). Consideration of effects due to individual differences are eschewed on the basis that personality variables are rarely clarified by investigators in a way that they can be seen to be mediated in behavioural terms.Also omitted are attitude scaling techniques per se. Concentration, then, is entirely focussed on phenomena associated with the judgmental act.The next three chapters are concerned mainly with cognitive factors which influence judgment, together with a comparison of several competing theories. In Chapter 2 an important difference is noted between the judgments of social and physical objects. The latter are located on a physical continuum which can be described independently from the observer's judgmental dimension, whereas attitudinal items, for example, are not actually favourable or unfavourable except from a judge's viewpoint. In other words, socially defined stimuli can only be located on a judgmental dimension. Consequently, the reader is cautioned not to extrapolate directly from a psycho-physical to a social-judgmental model. Attention is then given to the rival claims of adaptation-level theory (Helson), a 'rubber-band' model (Volkmann), and a range-frequency model (Parducci). The second and third of these are much concerned with the way in which a person presumably establishes anchor points at the ends of a stimulus range but not with the 'illdefined' pooled effects of all stimuli, past and present (as in Helson's theory). A reference to a 'subliminal' perception research (pp. 21-22) thought to pose *
An interpretation of social judgment is proposed that assumes that the polarization of a person's judgments of attitude statements is a function both of his own attitude toward the issue and of the verbal labels used to define the endpoints of the rating scale. Specifically, it is predicted that a person will show more polarization on a given scale, the more his own evaluations of the items are congruent with the value connotations of the scale labels. This prediction is supported by a study in which 75 teenagers rated 10 statements concerned with the issue of adult authority on 10 bipolar scales that differed with respect to implicit evaluation.
This note is a preliminary attempt to investigate attitude change from a standpoint that has received little systematic attention from social psychologists. Briefly stated, our proposal is that it is possible to change a person's attitude by inducing him to adopt particular verbal labels as appropriate for conceptualizing the issue in question. Our reasoning is based on the results of social judgment research, which indicate a relationship between a person's own opinion on an issue, and the kind of language he seems most prepared to use to describe the attitudes of others. Specifically, when the 'pro' extreme of the attitude continuum is labelled by a term with evaluatively positive connotations, and the
Children made a series of evaluative judgements of 20 nonsense words, which they were told to imagine were people's names. Each subject judged half the names in terms of two‐category rating scales containing an affirmative (A) response category which was evaluatively positive (E +) and a negative (n) category which was evaluatively negative (E ‐), e.g. ‘happy‐not happy’, the other half were judged in terms of scales where the A category was E ‐, and the N category E +, e.g. ‘rude ‐ not rude’. The main finding was a highly significant tendency for subjects to give more A than N responses, irrespective of evaluative content: in addition, a tendency for subjects to give more E ‐ than E + responses, irrespective of grammatical form, approached significance.
This study contributes to the accentuation theory of social judgement, which explains the judgement of attitude statements in terms of both the judge's attitude and the value connotations of the rating scale. It was hypothesized that subjects who were favourable towards two aspects of an issue (the value of work and interest in work) would give more polarized ratings to statements emphasizing a particular aspect when the rating scale used was specifically relevant to that aspect. It was also hypothesized that subjects who were more favourable towards one aspect of the issue than to the other would give more polarized ratings to statements emphasizing the more favoured aspect, irrespective of the specific relevance of the rating scale used. Both predictions were supported, and their relation to dimensional salience was discussed.
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