Browsing by Subject "Judgment"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Exposure to atypical exemplars : implications for stereotypic judgments of the group and the individual
    (2004) Grayer, Julia; Perloe, Sidney
    Social judgment research indicates that the direction of social judgments is dependent upon how a judge categorizes both the contextual stimuli and the target. Specifically, when a target is included in the representation of the contextual information, the target judgment will be assimilated towards the implications of the context, and vice versa. If the target is excluded from the representation of the context, the implications of the context will be contrasted away from the target, and vice versa. Exposure to a member of a stereotyped group thus affects subsequent judgments of both the group and the individual, but in opposite ways, and the direction is dependent upon whether the judge includes the individual in the stereotyped group or excludes the individual from the group. The present research builds upon these findings in three significant ways. First, unlike most previous studies, the exemplar we are examining is atypical in that it does not manifest all the expected traits associated with its group. Further, we examine not only the effect on the stereotyped group, but also the effect on the exemplar to which participants were originally exposed. Third, the contextual information is more complex than it has been in previous studies, with the intent of making such a presentation more naturalistic. The results revealed that including a well-integrated but atypical individual in, or excluding this individual from, a stereotyped group did not influence subsequent judgments of the stereotypicality of the group or of the individual. However, the order in which participants answered questions about the target (either group followed by individual, or individual followed by group), did influence judgments of stereotypicality. The factors that influence judges' categorization decisions are discussed in relation to these findings.
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    Inclusion and Exclusion: Implications for Stereotypic Judgments of Groups and Individuals
    (2004) Nussbaum, Jane; Perloe, Sidney; Le, Benjamin
    This paper presents a broad overview of various models of the judgment process, in an effort to place the present research within a larger theoretical context. Particular attention is paid to theories proposed by Parducci, Kahneman and Miller, Martin, Schwarz and Bless, Stapel and Koomen, and Mussweiler. The present research aimed to extend the prior finding that categorization of a moderately atypical exemplar as either within or without a group affects subsequent evaluations of both the group and the exemplar, but in opposite ways (Bless, Schwarz, Bodenhausen and Thiel, 2001). In this prior study, both assimilation and contrast effects were found. The present research, a methodologically similar study to Bless et al., employed a new method of presenting exemplar information (i.e., through film clips), intended to increase the ecological validity of the study, allowing participants to gather exemplar information from both auditory and visual domains. As well, the present research utilized a stereotyped group (i.e., the elderly) not used in the previous research. The results of this research did not support the main hypothesis. While people did evaluate the exemplar and the group differently, such evaluative differences were not the effect of differential categorization of the exemplar. It is hypothesized that the lack of empirical support for the main effects may have been due to the fact that the manipulation of the dependent variable was weak; alternately, the measure of the dependent variable may not have been effective. One strong and surprising--although interesting--interaction did emerge from the data analyses: an interaction between the order in which the targets were evaluated, and the evaluations of the targets themselves. Specifically, when the exemplar was evaluated first, evaluations of the exemplar and group were contrasted away from each other. It is suggested that this finding may be able to be accounted for by several factors--such as distinctiveness and category width--presented in prior judgment theories.
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    The Influential Nature of Stereotypes in the Formation of Judgments: The Evaluation Bias
    (1995) Steisel, Paula H.; Cassidy, Kimberly Wright; Perloe, Sidney
    The evaluation bias occurs when the same piece of work is judged differently depending on the sex of the author or producer of the work. The purpose of this experiment was to see whether men and women rate articles differently depending upon the gender of the author of the article. This experiment was conducted to examine the effects of the gender of the author, the school environment, and the gender of the rater on evaluations of three different articles in a male dominated, female dominated, and neutral field. Subjects read three articles with a male author, female author, and author with an initial in the three fields. Subjects from a coeducational and all female college rated the articles on five different dimensions: writing style, competency of the author in the subject area, persuasiveness, depth of the article, and quality of the article. There was no evidence of the evaluation bias in our study. Overall effects between male and female raters resulted in a main effect of gender of the rater for the female article so that women evaluated the female domain more favorably than men. It was hypothesized that women at all female schools would be more aware of discriminatory behavior and evaluate articles authored by males and females equally. Results showed that women from an all female school rated the female author of a feminine article less favorably than the women from a coeducational school. Another hypothesis was based upon the centrality of gender where individuals who find gender to be central are more likely to see themselves as part of the in-group, the category of female and therefore rate other females as individuals rather than base the ratings on stereotypes of the category, female. Due to the few subjects who placed their gender on the Who am I? test, this hypothesis could not be tested in this experiment.