Recall for behaviors that were either consistent or inconsistent with a previously presented set of uniform trait adjectives was studied. Similar to Hastie and Kumar (1979), recall for inconsistent behaviors was better when they constituted the minority of behavior descriptions. However, the reverse was found when consistent behaviors formed the minority set. The majority set, rather than the minority set, of behavior descriptions determined impression ratings of the fictional character. These results were discussed in terms of the effects of trait information as compared to behavioral information on person memory.
A courtroom simulation technique was employed to examine the effects of a communicator's looking behavior on observers' perceptions of his credibility. Half of the subjects heard testimony presented on behalf of a defendent by a witness (one of three confederates) who was visually presented as either looking directly toward the target of his communication (gaze maintenance) or slightly downward (gaze aversion) while testifying. The other half of the subjects merely heard the audio portion of the testimony. The results indicated that witnesses who averted their gaze were perceived to be less credible and, ultimately, the defendant for whom they testified was judged as more likely to be guilty. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for research concerned with the communicative effects of visual behavior.
Whether or not actors attribute their successes to personal factors such as ability and/or effort and their failures to situational factors such as task difficulty or luck (see Miller and Ross, 1975, for a critical review), there is evidence that observers seem to adopt just such an attributional stance (Beckman, 1973;Feather and Simon, 1975;Frieze and Weiner, 1971; Ross, Bierbrauer and Polly, 1974 , although primarily concerned with sex effects in attributions made about hypothetical students in sex-linked academic programs (e.g., medicine, nursing), report that 'failure was more likely to be attributed to the difficulty of the task than success was to the ease of the task'. Frieze and Weiner (1971), reporting a pattern of findings consistent with these results, attempted to avoid explicit task definition by asking their subjects to imagine hypothetical actors doing hypothetical tasks. However, since the research was conducted in an academic setting,
From Chomsky's assertion that the deep and surface structures of very simple utterances are highly similar, it follows that judgments of the degree of acceptability of such utterances should approximate judgments of their grammaticality. To test Chomsky's assertion that all native speakers of English share the same deep structure, judgments of the acceptability of selected permutations of examples of Scott's subject-verb-object-qualifier (SVOQ) were obtained. The design of the experiment was 3 x 8 x 2 x 3 factorial, with three levels of education (Group 1 — university students, Group 2 — people with three or four years of high school, and Group 3 — people with one or two years of high school), eight of degree of disruption of SVOQ, two of familiarity (sentences consisted either of very low or very high frequency words), and three of qualifier (common adverbs, -ly adverbs, and prepositional phrases). The analysis of S judgments (cases where a permutation was said to be grammatical and the same in meaning as the SVOQ form) yielded a significant Groups x Permutations x Familiarity interaction because, in the low familiar sentences, Group 3 (and, to some extent, Group 2) showed less capacity for grammatical discrimination than Group 1. The analysis of D judgments (cases where a permutation was said to be grammatical but different in meaning from SVOQ) yielded a number of significant main effects and interactions, which were generally interpreted as showing that Group 1 showed more grammatical sophistication than the other groups. On the basis of the experimental results it was concluded that Chomsky's assertion regarding deep structure had been falsified.
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