EFFECT OF THE CONTEXT UPON PERSONALITY-IMPRESSION FORMATION
1971 Volume 41 Issue 6 Pages 307-313
Details
1971 Volume 41 Issue 6 Pages 307-313
The present study is designed to investigate the effect of the context upon personality-impression formation. The main variable to be examined is the amount of stimuli: that is, it is investigated whether the increase in the amount of stimuli increases the context effect.
Stimulus informations consisted of simple lists of personality-trait adjectives. Traits selected as the stimuli are those which are either highly desirable (H), mildly desirable (M+) mildly undesirable (M-), or highly undesirable (L). These traits were selected from the normative data on social desirability.
Ss rated the likableness of test adjectives accompanied with 2 or 4 context adjectives under either of the following two instructional conditions. 46 Ss rated the test adjectives under the person condition (P-C), in which the stimuli were presented as indicating some college students. 46 Ss were assigned to the word condition (W-C), in which the stimuli were presented as only clusters of personality-trait adjectives.
The value of test adjectives is H or L, and the value of context adjectives is H, M+, M-, or L. After rating the overall likableness to each of 16 stimulus sets (see Table 1), Ss evaluated the likableness of each of the test adjectives under the instructional conditions.
Results are as follows:
1. The context effect is shown in the P-C, but not in the W-C condition: that is, evaluations of test adjectives are displaced toward the likableness of the context adjectives in P-C.
2. The context effect shown in P-C increases with increased discrepancy between the likableness of a test adjective and that of a context one.
3. The amount of context adjectives is significantly related with the context effect: namely, the magnitude of the effect increases as the amount becomes larger.
4. In W-C, increased amount of adjectives increases the polarization of evaluation.
These results are found in the H but not in the L test-adjectives, and seem to be consistent with the hypothesis of a shift in meaning as suggested by Asch (1946).
