No abstract

Male college subjects read an essay that supposedly had been written by a college freshman co-ed. They then evaluated the quality of the essay and the ability of its writer on several dimensions. By means of a photo attached to the essay, one third of the subjects were led to believe that the writer was physically attractive and one third that she was unattractive. The remaining subjects read the essay without any information about the writer's appearance. In addition, one half of the subjects read a version of the essay that was well written while the other subjects read a version that was poorly written. Significant main effects for essay quality and writer attractiveness were predicted and obtained. The subjects who read the good essay evaluated the writer and her work more favorably than the subjects who read the poor essay. The subjects also evaluated the writer and her work most favorably when she was attractive, least when she was unattractive, and intermediately when her appearance was unknown. The impact of the writer's attractiveness on the evaluation of her and her work was most pronounced when the "objective" quality of her work was relatively poor.There is an increasing amount of research data attesting to the relative importance of physical attractiveness as a determinant and moderator of a wide variety of interpersonal processes: heterosexual liking (Berscheid,

A study of experiments in major social psychology journals shows that measures of independent variables have become increasingly common. The role in experiments of measures of independent variables and proposed mediating variables is examined. In the causal sequence assumed in interpreting an experimental result, the independent variable and proposed mediating variable are presumed to mediate the effect of the experimental treatment on the dependent measure. Measures of independent variables and mediators provide checks on the assumptions that the experimental treatment successfully manipulated those variables and are unquestionably useful. A separate, controversial issue is whether such measures are necessary in experiments. If no plausible alternative explanations exist, data from such measures are not needed. Plausible alternative explanations are not eliminated by data from such measures. Alternative explanations, critical for assessing construct validity (Cook & Campbell, 1979), are distinguished from different general theoretical accounts of a finding.

The possibility that social-desirability-tainted responses emerge in the study of stereotypes is suggested and examined. Sixty white American subjects were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions. Subjects were asked to indicate how characteristic each of 22 adjective traits was of either "Americans" or "Negroes." This was cross-cut by a measurement variable: Half of the subjects responded in a rating situation in which they were presumably free to distort their responses. Remaining subjects responded under "bogus pipeline" conditions; that is, they were led to believe that the experimenter had an accurate, distortion-free physiological measure of their attitudes, and they were asked to predict that measure. The results supported our expectation that the stereotype ascribed to Negroes would be more favorable under rating than under bogus pipeline conditions. Americans were more favorably stereotyped under bogus pipeline than under rating conditions. A number of explanations for these results are discussed, and consideration is given to the relationship between verbally expressed attitudes and other, overt, behavior.

The physical attractiveness of a criminal defendant (attractive, unattractive, no information) and the nature of the crime (attractiveness-related, attractiveness-unrelated) were varied in a factorial design. After reading one of the case accounts, subjects sentenced the defendant to a term of imprisonment. An interaction was predicted: When the crime was unrelated to attractiveness (burglary), subjects would assign more lenient sentences to the attractive defendant than to the unattractive defendant; when the offense was attractiveness-related (swindle), the attractive defendant would receive harsher treatment. The results confirmed the predictions, thereby supporting a cognitive explanation for the relationship between the physical attractiveness of defendants and the nature of the judgments made against them.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract