A test of the golden section hypothesis with elicted constructs.

Abstract

Dimensions of meaning elicited from subjects were used to test the golden section hypothesis, which predicts that when people use bipolar dimensions to make judgments about their personal acquaintances, they will use the evaluatively positive pole an average of 62% of the time. Forty-four subjects completed a Role Construct Repertory Test with 21 acquaintances judged in terms of 18 elicited dimensions. Results supported the extension of the golden section to dichotomous judgments with elicited constructs and also to scalar judgments for males. This study provides the first direct evidence of the greater perceived usefulness of those constructs which subjects used in the 62/38 proportion. The discussion focuses on the implications of the results for the manner in which people use their personal constructions of others.

Asymmetric relations in positive and negative evaluations of acquaintances

“…The present results are also consistent with those of Rigdon and Epting (1982), who elicited 19 constructs individually from subjects and asked them to identify the "favorable" and "unfavorable" poles. Subjects then used their own personal constructs to evaluate a list of persons that was "approximately balanced between evaluatively positive acquaintances (e.g., happiest person you know) and evaluatively negative acquaintances (e.g., most unethical person you know)" (Rigdon & Epting, p. 1083).…”

“…It has been found in several experiments (for a review, see AdamsWebber, 1990a), that when people categorize other persons on the basis of bipolar constructs, they tend to assign them, on average, to positive poles ( e g , h p p y ) approximately 62% of the time. This result was obtained by a number of investigators using both elicited and supplied constructs and real and imaginary figures, and it was found not only with adults, but also with children and adolescents of every age between 8 and 19 in Canada, England, Poland, Trinidad, and the United States (Adams-Webber, 1978,1979,1992bAdams-Webber & Benjafield, 1973;Adams-Webber & Rodney, 1983;Benjafield & AdamsWebber, 1975,1976Benjafield & Green, 1978;Frey & Adams-Webber, 1992;Kahgee, et al, 1982;Leach, 1979;Lee, 1989;Lee & Adams-Webber, 1987;Leenaars, 1981;Lefebvre et al, 1986;Marczewska, 1983;Rigdon & Epting, 1982;Romany & Adams-Webber, 1981;Soldz, 1990;Tuohy, 1987;Tuohy & Stradling, 1987;and Walton, 1982). As Lefebvre (1992a) recently put it, "research in this area has led to the discovery that the frequency of 0.62 has a special persistence in statistics of binary choice" Benjafield and I (Benjafield & Adams-Webber, 1976) hypothesized that the exact theoretical value of this proportion is (45 -1)/2 = 0.6180 .…”

“…This conjecture was supported by Rigdon and Epting's (1982) finding that the more useful a subject judged a particular construct for understanding people, the more closely the distribution of his or her positive and negative judgments of other persons on that construct approximated 62% and 38%, respectively. They argued that "people who view most of the events in their life (approximately 62%) as positive will more effectively discriminate between positive and negative events in their life and be prepared to cope with negative events'' (Rigdon & Epting, p. 1086).…”

Construct asymmetry and the range of relevance of personal anticipations

“…This line of inference receives support from Rigdon and Epting's (1982) finding that, the more useful a subject rates a particular construct for understanding people, the more closely the distribution of her/his positive and negative judgments of other persons on that construct approximates 62/38 respectively. Wheeler (1990, p. 80) has pursued the logic of this argument further with his suggestion that 'saliency (the negative pole of the golden section distribution of judgments) may be an index of the environmental (or niche-theoretic) adaptation mechanism of our species'.…”

Judgmental asymmetry in the exercise of police discretion

“…The typical imbalance can be quantified at approximately 63 per cent for positive responses and hence 37 per cent for negative responses (Benjafield and Adams-Webber, 1976), an effect which has been repeatedly observed (Boucher and Osgood, 1969;Eiser and Mower White, 1973;Osgood and Richards, 1973;Adams-Webber, 1977,1978Benjafield and Green, 1978;Adams-Webber and Davidson, 1979;Shalit, 1980;Rigdon and Epting, 1982;Benjafield, 1984;Tuohy, 1987;Tuohy and Stradling, 1987). It has recently been demonstrated that the judgmental asymmetry effect may also be detected with continuous rating scale responses when these are dichotomized by ipsatization about each subject's mean (Tuohy, 1987;Tuohy and Stradling, 1987).…”