Eighty-four subjects rated eight hypothetical situations for pleasantness, tension, and consistency on 9-point scales. The situations were of the personother-object (P-O-X) type, consisting of two persons and an unspecified but important "thing." The situations varied in terms of the liking relation between P and O (positive or negative) and the presence or absence of agreement concerning X. Intercorrelation of the ratings indicated that the subjects tended to regard as unpleasant the same situations that they regarded as tension provoking. Tension and pleasantness ratings correlated less with the consistency ratings than with each other. There was evidence that the pleasantness and tension ratings were based more on attraction (i.e., the sign of the P/0 bond) than on agreement or balance. Balance was, however, the more important factor when the subjects rated for consistency. The findings, when taken together, have three major implications: (a) balance relates more directly to the cognitive than to the affective component of social perception; (6) dependent measures based on affect, for example, pleasantness ratings, seem inappropriate to Heider's theory; and (c) when an appropriate cognitive task is employed, contrary to Newcomb's predictions, balance effects emerge for both P/O positive and P/O negative sentiment bonds.A number of studies that have used pleasantness ratings to test derivatives of Heider's (1946Heider's ( , 1958 balance hypothesis indicated that subjects tend to distinguish between balanced situations containing positive relations between person (P) and other (O) and those in which the P/O bond is negative, the latter being rated considerably more unpleasant than the former (e.g.,
Several Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) studies have now shown that incentive magnitude has little effect upon average cooperation levels. This finding has prompted some investigators to conclude that the typical tise of trivial payoffs does not jeopardize the meaning of previous PD findings. The present experiment was undertaken to examine the tenability of this conclusion. Eighty male undergraduates served as subjects in a 10-ttial PD game. Two levels of incentive, pennies and dollars, were crossed with two levels of instruction, traditional and comprehensive. Average cooperation levels did not differ across the four experimental conditions. High incentives, however, produced significantly greater interdyad variance than low incentives. The difference in variance between instruction conditions was not significant. Reliability coefficients for the task and measures of response latency suggest that the increase in variance for high incentives was true variance, rather than error variance. Results suggest that generalization from PD studies using trivial incentives should be limited to behavior in parlor games.
A study was conducted in which children in four age groups-5-6, 7-8, 9-10, and 11-12 years-rated eight hypothetical social situations of the P-O-X type for pleasantness and for psychological consistency. The results indicated that children in all age groups based their ratings of both pleasantness and consistency primarily on attraction (i.e., the sign of the P/O bond). Balance and agreement effects, although statistically significant, were small in all groups. The findings were confirmed in a cross-validation study conducted concurrently with the principal study by an independent naive experimenter.Balance involves the interaction of the liking relation between P and 0 and the agreement between them concerning X. Balanced states are those in which P and O like one another and agree or, alternatively, where they dislike one another and disagree. Imbalanced states combine interpersonal liking and disagreement or disliking and agreement. The implication of this principle, according to Heider (1946Heider ( , 1958, is that neither agreement nor attraction alone, but the interaction between them, produces strain for consistency. Zajonc (1968) compared the effect of balance with the effect of attraction (independent of agreement) and agreement (independent of attraction) for eight studies purporting to test Heider's theory. The results of this comparison, according to Zajonc, failed to yield strong support for the balance principle since approximately half of the studies favored agreement over balance as the more critical determinant of the subjects' responses. Inspection of the studies cited by Zajonc indicates, however, that the bulk of evidence in favor of agreement comes from studies which used pleasantness ratings as the
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.