President paragraphs

Abstract

A collection of 220 paragraphs of graded value about U.S. presidents is given. The collection includes 16 paragraphs about each of nine presidents and 8 paragraphs about each of eight presidents. For each president, the paragraphs have one of four rough values for judgments of statesmanship, H, M+, M-, and L. These paragraphs have proved useful in experimental applications of integration theory to attitude change. Other advantages of U.S. history as a source of issues and material for research on attitudes are also pointed out. This report makes available a collection of paragraphs about U.S. presidents that we have found useful in applications of integration theory to attitude change (Anderson, 1971). Each paragraph contains information about some president, usually on his performance in office though sometimes on other actions and accomplishments. In the experiments, the S reads a set of paragraphs about some president and then judges him on statemanship and how well he did his job. Three experiments have used these paragraphs in successful tests of information integration theory (Anderson, 1972; Anderson & Farkas, 1972; Sawyers & Anderson, 1971). Good support has been found for the parallelism prediction in all three experiments. The second cited study has particular interest since it obtained the first serial position curve in attitude research. That was possible only because of this collection of stimulus materials. The main body of the collection contains 16 paragraphs about each of nine presidents and 8 paragraphs about each of eight presidents. In each case, there are equally many paragraphs at each of four levels of favorableness: very favorable, H, mildly favorable, M+; mildly unfavorable, M-; and very unfavorable, L. There are also paragraphs about three presidents that serve as end-anchors, and a short history summary.

Prose memory: Forgetting rates for memory codes.

“…Each subject read two factual paragraphs about an American president, either Theodore Roosevelt or Thomas Jefferson. The paragraphs were taken from Anderson, Sawyers, and Farkas( 1972). One paragraph served as a target paragraph that was later tested, and one as a filler.…”

“…Materials and procedure. The same pool of three paragraphs per president was used, and three additional paragraphs about each president were taken from the same source (Anderson et al, 1972). These additional paragraphs were not tested but were used to increase the memory load.…”

In search of reliable persuasion effects: I. A computer-controlled procedure for studying persuasion.

“…McGuire (e.g., Watts & McGuire, 1964) used within-subjects designs in several persuasion studies conducted in the 1960s; Anderson has recently developed and standardized a set of persuasive communications (president paragraphs- Anderson, Sawyers, & Farkas, 1972) and has used them in largescale within-subjects experiments (e.g., Anderson & Farkas, 1973); computers have seen widespread application in other areas of psychological research. Second, although a large amount of data is reported here, it will become apparent that significant methodological problems remain.…”

Impressions of presidents: Effects of information, time, and discrepancy

“…Eight paragraphs (four highly favorable and four highly unfavorable) were selected from Anderson, Sawyers, and Farkas (1972) for each of eight presidents: Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Andrew Jackson, Grover Oeveland, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman. Each subject was asked to rate a set of four paragraphs for each president on an 8-point scale ranging from highly unfavorable to highly favorable, counterbalanced for order (1 to 8 or 8 to 1).…”