[advances in experimental social psychology] advances in experimental social psychology volume 39...
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ADVANCESSOCIAL PSYDOI: 10.1016
ON THE PARAMETERS OF
HUMAN JUDGMENT
Arie W. Kruglanski
Antonio Pierro
Lucia Mannetti
Hans‐Peter Erb
Woo Young Chun
This chapter reviews research concerning several continuous parameters
whose combinations determine the judgmental impact of the information
given. The present framework oVers an integration of prior judgmental
models in various domains by conceptually distinguishing between qualita-
tively distinct contents of information and the quantitative dimensions on
which judgmental contexts may vary. Evidence for the present formulation
includes a broad array of findings across diVerent areas of psychology, andthe discussion considers the comprehensive perspective it oVers on human
judgment.
I. Introduction
The judgment of persons, objects, and events is a ubiquitous human activity
inexorably involved in people’s everyday aVairs. From the moment we open
our eyes, if not before, we continually pass judgments on a variety of issues. Is it
time to get up, brush our teeth, get dressed?What should one wear?What is the
weather like?How should one’s day unfold? Is it safe to cross the street? Should
one buy or sell? Should one ‘‘order in’’ tonight? And so continually, until the
momentwe shut our eyes and lull ourselves to sleep. Small wonder then that the
255IN EXPERIMENTAL Copyright 2007, Elsevier Inc.CHOLOGY, VOL. 39 All rights reserved./S0065-2601(06)39005-3 0065-2601/07 $35.00
256 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
mysteries of human judgment have fascinated theorists and researchers across
the diVerent areas of psychology including its social, cognitive, perceptual,
clinical, organizational, and personality subfields.
The domain of human judgments is exceedingly diverse and multifaceted.
First, judgments vary a great deal in the domain of content to which they
belong. ‘‘Causal attributions’’ constitute judgments, but so do ‘‘category assign-
ments,’’ ‘‘stereotypiccharacterizations,’’ ‘‘behavioral identifications,’’ ‘‘likelihood
estimates,’’ ‘‘personality impressions,’’ ‘‘attitudes,’’ and ‘‘beliefs.’’ Secondly, judg-
ments vary in their speed and immediacy. Some are based on painstaking
deliberations and a laborious processing of available information. Other
‘‘pop out’’ quite eVortlessly from the stimulus field confronting the perceiver.
They come to mind instantly and intuitively. They feel objective and inevitable,
as if simply impelled by the external reality.
Judgments vary also on the process‐awareness dimension. Some (e.g., of
attorneys in a court of law, or of scholars in an academic treatise) are highly
conscious and transparent; they often come in a written form wherein the
chain of reasoning is explicated in an elaborate detail. Others arise mysteri-
ously, as if out of nowhere, and as an end result of an opaque process
refractory to conscious discovery (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Wilson, Dunn,
Kraft, & Lisle, 1989).
Possibly driven by this multifarious variability, a plethora of models and
theories has been advanced to explain diVerent judgmental phenomena,
some highlighting judgmental content domains (e.g., models of stereotyping,
of attribution, or of attitudes), others drawing distinctions along the amount
of processing continuum (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986),
yet other stressing the diVerences between ‘‘automatic’’ and ‘‘deliberative’’
ways of judging, including aspects of eYciency as well as awareness (Bargh,
1996; Devine, 1989). As a consequence of these varied distinctions, the field
of human judgment appears highly fragmented these days, and the diVerentbodies of judgmental research hardly interact with each other.
The question, therefore, is whether an integrative assembly of these various
‘‘puzzle pieces’’ is at all possible and ‘‘how is it all put back together?’’
(Anderson et al., 2004, p. 1036). Clearly, a comprehensive synthesis of the
general judgmental domain would be desirable in light of the growing hetero-
geneity of concepts and models that lend this field of inquiry a complex and
unwieldy character. It is along these lines that Newell (1990, p. 18) argued for
‘‘the necessity of a theory that provides the total picture and explains the role of
the parts and why they exist.’’
In the present chapter, we oVer an outline of such theory. Our key notion
is that of judgmental parameters. By these we mean several dimensional
variables intersecting at some of their values in each judgmental instance.
These variables have been yielded by decades of research on human
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 257
judgment and are well known and noncontroversial. Our proposal highlights
the role of their combinations in determining the degree to which a specific,
situationally given, information aVects judgments (i.e., the degree to which
it is persuasive, convincing, and impactful). Moreover, whereas each judg-
mental situation involves some informational contents, it is presently as-
sumed that apart from the parametric values with which they happen to be
associated, these contents as such are immaterial to the information’s impact.
As will be shown, the conceptual framework resulting from these assump-
tions aVords a novel way of viewing prior findings, and it enables the
generation of novel predictions in a variety of domains.
This chapter is divided into four sequential parts. In Part 1, we describe the
judgmental function of rule following and contrast it with its various proposed
alternatives such as associative learning, pattern recognition, or attribute
matching. As a preview of what is to come, we conclude that, in general,
judgments are mediated by rules, broadly conceived, and that the diVerencesbetween rule following and other putative processes are semantic rather than
substantive. In Part 2, we identify several continuous parameters whose combi-
nations at various values determine whether and to what degree the informa-
tion given would aVect judgments. In Part 3, we present our theory of the
judgmental process and the supporting empirical evidence from the realm of
complex social judgments. Part 4 recapitulates our model’s contributions and
considers their implications.
II. The Role of Rules in Judgment Formation
We are assuming that judgments are based on information the knower treats
as ‘‘evidence.’’ For instance, in forming an attitudinal judgment one
may consider information about the positive and negative consequences
mediated by an attitude object (Albarracin, Johnson, & Zanna, 2005); such
presumed consequences serve as evidence for the attitude object’s goodness
(or badness). In forming a causal attribution, one may consider information
about the covariation of an eVect with an entity as evidence that the entity is
cause of that eVect (Kelley, 1967, 1971). In forming an impression of
a person, prejudiced individuals may treat that individual’s category mem-
bership (e.g., her or his gender, profession, race, age, or religion) as evidence
for various characteristics stereotypically attached to that category. In fore-
casting one’s future aVective state, given a present traumatic event (e.g.,
denial of tenure, bankruptcy), one’s evidence might be one’s presumed immedi-
ate feeling, plus a subjective estimate of its duration (Wilson, Centerbar,Kermer,
& Gilbert, 2005), and so on.
258 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
A. THE IMPLICATIONAL STRUCTURE OF REASONING
From the present perspective, to fulfill the evidential function information
has to fit an inference rule of an ‘‘IF THEN’’ type (Erb et al., 2003;
Kruglanski & Thompson, 1999a,b; Pierro, Mannetti, Kruglanski, & Sleeth‐Keppler, 2004). For example, information that an actor succeeded on a
diYcult cognitive task could serve as evidence that he/she is intelligent,
given the prior assumption that ‘‘success at diYcult cognitive tasks betokens
intelligence.’’
More formally speaking, the reasoning from evidence to conclusions is
syllogistic.1 It includes a major premise, the ‘‘IF X THEN Y’’ conditional
rule mentioned above, and a minor premise that instantiates the antecedent
term of the major premise (X) for a given entity (event, and so on) P,
asserting that P is X, hence that Y is to be expected. For instance, a person
may subscribe to the stereotypic belief ‘‘if rocket scientist then intelligent.’’
On an instance of encountering P, a rocket scientist (minor premise instan-
tiating the antecedent term of the major premise), the knower would be
subjectively justified in inferring that he or she is, therefore, intelligent.
B. CONDITIONING PHENOMENA
The foregoing, schematic, depiction of syllogistic reasoningmay sound highly
‘‘rational,’’ ‘‘conscious,’’ and ‘‘explicit’’ and in this sense distinct from
associatively mediated judgments, assumed to be ‘‘intuitive,’’ ‘‘implicit,’’ or
‘‘automatic.’’ Yet, from the present perspective, the distinction between the
two merits a closer look. An insight into the processes involved comes from
the many decades of research on conditioning phenomena. These have been
generally viewed as the paradigmatic example of associative learning; none-
theless, there has been increasing tendency to accept the conclusion (Holyoak,
Koh, & Nisbett, 1989; Rescorla, 1985; Rescorla & Holland, 1982; Rescorla
& Wagner, 1972) that they are fundamentally rule based, in fact.
Originally, associative learning was assumed to constitute learning by
contiguity, and repeated pairing of a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an uncon-
ditioned stimulus (US). Yet, evidence from the animal‐learning literature
suggests that neither is necessary nor suYcient for conditioning to occur. This
is attested by the fact that conditioning can occur on a single co‐occurrenceof stimuli, and when an interval of minutes or even hours elapses between
1It is not meant here that people’s reasoning generally follows the rules of formal logic, or is
capable of drawing the various logical implications of conditional statements, a state of aVairs
bellied by decades of research on the Wason’s four card task (Wason & Johnson‐Laird, 1972)among others.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 259
the stimuli . Thus, if a rat ingest ed a novel substa nce an d was made ill minutes
or hours later, it will form a strong aversion to that substance (Garcia,
M cGowan , Ervin, & Koell ing, 1968 ). As Holyoa k et al. ( 1989 , p. 316) noted
‘‘tast e aversi on . . . is onl y the extreme of a co ntinuum of success ful con dition-
ing that occu rs despite lags betw een CS and US present ation. Ther e are many
de monstrati ons of classical and inst rument al co ndition ing in whi ch the delay
be tween events is on the order of man y seconds or minut es.’’
Blocking experiments too establish that temporal contiguity between a CS
and a US is not suYcient for conditioning. In this research, a normally eVectiveCS, placed in close temporal relation to a reinforcer, seems largely unable
to produce conditioning if paired with another CS that had been previously
established as a signal for that reinforcer. That temporal contiguity is not
suYcient for conditioning has been further demonstrated by (1) Rescorla’s
(1968) results that if the probability of the reinforcer is the same in the absence
of the CS as in its presence no appreciable conditioning will take place, (2) by
conditioned inhibition eVects whereby a higher order stimulus (CS1) paired on
some trials with another CS stimulus that on other trials was paired with some
US (say, a shock) comes actually to inhibit the reaction associated with the
US (e.g., crouching) even though a strict associative interpretation (of second
order conditioning) would suggest that this stimulus (i.e., the CS1) should
evoke that very reaction. It thus appears that an animal, rather than responding
mechanistically to contiguous pairings of stimuli over repeated occasions
(representing the associative account), is attempting to learn environmental
contingencies in which the occurrence of one event (e.g., shock) is conditional
on the occurrence of another (e.g., noise). This formulation is reminiscent of
Tolman’s (1932) classic sign‐learning theory whereby what is learned is an
expectancy, or a conditional probability, that a given environmental ‘‘sign’’
(e.g., the appearance of a light) presages a given ‘‘significate’’ (e.g., food).
According to Holyoak et al. (1989, p. 320) specifically,
Rules drive the system’s behavior by means of a recognize‐act cycle. On each cycle,
the conditions of rules are matched against representations of active declarative
information, which we . . . term messages; rules with conditions that are satisfied by
current messages become candidates for execution. For example, if a message repre-
senting the recent occurrence of a tone is active, the conditions of the above rule will
be matched and the actions it specifies may be taken.
It is noteworthy that the ‘‘rule’’ assumed by Holyoak et al. (1989) is
analogous to the major premise, and the ‘‘message’’ is analogous to the minor
premise, that is, an instantiation of the antecedent term in the major premise,
warranting the inference of the consequent term. Thus, ‘‘the rat’s knowledge
about the relation between tones and shocks might be informally represented
260 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
by a rule such as ‘if a tone sounds in the chamber then a shock will occur,
so stop other activities and crouch’’’ (Holyoak et al., 1989). The foregoing
represents the major premise, and the sounding of a tone in a specific
instance represents the minor premise, jointly aVording the inference that
‘‘crouching’’ was indicated.
The rules underlying conditioning phenomena may be applied speedily and
eYciently. It has been long known that ‘‘automatic’’ phenomena involve a
routinization of IFTHENsequences. Research in this domain has demonstrated
that social judgments (Smith & Branscombe, 1988; Smith, Branscombe, &
Bormann, 1988) represent a special case of procedural learning (Anderson,
1983), based on processes (such as practice) that strengthen the IF THEN
relation resulting in an increased ‘‘automaticity’’ of rule‐based responses
(cf. Bargh, 1996; Neal, Wood, & Quinn, 2006).
1. Pavlovian Versus Evaluative Conditioning
Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2006) suggested that whereas classical or
Pavlovian conditioning is, in fact, propositional, or rule‐based, truly associa-tive processes are based on evaluative learning which is not. A paradigmatic
case of evaluative conditioning is the pairing of a valenced US (say a posi-
tively valenced smiling face) with a neutral CS (say an expressionless face) and
finding that the CS then acquired the valence of the US (i.e., became posi-
tively valenced). Such paradigm is admittedly diVerent from the Pavlovian
conditioning paradigm in which the CS constitutes a signal for the occurrence
of the US. The processes mediating evaluative conditioning are not well under-
stood at this time (Walther, Nagengast, & Trasselli, 2005). Thus, it seems
premature to conclude that evaluative conditioning is not propositional in
nature. For example, Fazio (personal communication, 2005) has proposed that
evaluative conditioning may represent the misattribution to the CS of aVectevoked by the US. Such a process is inferential (as are attributional processes
generally) and hence propositional, in the IF THEN sense. Specifically, one
might infer that if positive aVect was experienced in presence of the CS then
it may have been caused by the CS, warranting a reexperience of the aVect onsubsequent CS presentations.
Alternatively, the CS and the US may form a Gestalt or a group of likable
or unlikable individuals (Walther et al., 2005). Once a CS was categorized as
member of that group, its subsequent appearances may evoke the aVect/evaluation accorded to that group. That would also explain why in evalua-
tive conditioning situations, presentations of the CS alone do not lead to
extinction unlike such presentations in a Pavlovian conditioning situations
(Baeyens, Crombez, Van den Bergh, & Eelen, 1988). In the latter situation,
an appearance of a CS without a subsequent US is inconsistent with the IF
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 261
THEN rule whereby if the CS appears, the US will follow. By contrast, in an
evaluative conditioning situation, presentation of the CS alone does not
invalidate the rule: Once the CS was categorized as member of a group, its
appearance without alternative members of the group does not undermine
its group membership. Imagine that X was classified as a ‘‘terrorist’’ because
of her or his associative connection with a known Al Qaeda member (say
Osama Bin Laden). Encountering X subsequently without the presence of
Bin Laden should not undermine her or his membership in the terrorist
category, because the relevant proposition ‘‘X is a terrorist’’ does not imply
that X would always, or even often, be in Bin Laden’s company.
C. PERCEPTION AND PSYCHOPHYSICS
The idea that even the most basic perceptual judgments are rule‐basedreceives support from research in psychophysics (Pizlo, 2001). Whereas
Fechner (1860/1966) posited that the ‘‘percept’’ is a result of a causal chain
of events emanating from the object, and giving rise to corresponding
sensory data and brain processes to end with the precept of the distal
stimulus, subsequent approaches, including Helmholtzian, Structural, and
Gestalt perspectives, provided evidence that the percept is not directly
elicited by the stimulus, but rather that it involves an unconscious inference
(Helmholtz, 1910/2000) from an associated bundle of sensations. An app-
roach developed within the computer vision community (Pizlo, 2001) treats
perception as solution of an inverse2 problem that depends critically on
innate constraints, or rules, for interpreting proximal stimuli (e.g., the retinal
images). According to this view, ‘‘perception is about inferring the properties
of the distal stimulus X given the proximal stimulus Y (Pizlo, 2001, p. 3146,
emphasis added).
Similar views have been articulated byRock (1983)whodiscussed perceptual
phenomena as inferences from premises (p. 3). Thus, for example, ‘‘Assuming
the perceptual system has available in some form ‘knowledge’ about the prin-
ciples of geometrical optics, objective size could be inferred or computed by
taking account of distance. In following the same rules and making inferences
from them, various anomalies, such as . . . the perceived motion of the afterim-
age, become perfectly predictable’’ (p. 37). And in the realm of vision Gregory
(1997, p. 11) asserted that ‘‘Seeing objects involves general rules, and knowl-
edge of objects from previous experience, derived largely from active hands‐onexploration.’’ Therefore, ‘‘Hypotheses of perception . . . are risky, as they are
2Inverse in the sense that the proximal stimulus (e.g., the retinal image) originally produced
by the distal stimulus is now used to decode such stimulus, going backward as it were.
262 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
predictive and they go beyond sensed evidence to hidden properties and to
the future . . .’’ (Gregory, 1997, p. 10). Finally, an Annual Review chapter
‘‘treats object perception as a visual inferenceproblem’’ (Kersten,Mammassian,
& Yuille, 2004, p. 272, emphasis added), and proposes that ‘‘the visual system
resolves ambiguity through built in knowledge of how retinal images are
formed and uses this knowledge to automatically and unconsciously infer
the properties of objects . . .’’ (Kersten et al., 2004, p. 273, emphasis added).
D. AWARENESS
Unconscious inferences are not unique to the realm of perceptional phenom-
ena. Routinized cognitive rules as well become ‘‘eYcient,’’ requiring lesser
atte ntional resourc es for the execu tion of judgme nts. As W illiam James (1890 ,
p. 496) aptly put it ‘‘consciousness deserts all processes when it can no longer
be of use.’’ James’ parsimony principle asserts that routinization removes the
need for conscious control of the process, rendering awareness of the process
superfluous. Logan (1992) similarly argued that automatization of activities
eVects an attentional shift to higher organizational levels (see also Vallacher&Wegner, 1985). A champion tennis player, for instance, does not need to pay
attention to the correct grip, knee bending, or the following through on her
strokes. Instead, she can concentrate on strategic aspects of the game, such as
the type of stroke to execute and its court placement.
Indeed, various judgmental eVects based on routinized IF THEN rules take
place outside of conscious awareness. For instance, social cognitive work on
spontaneous trait inferences (Newman & Uleman, 1989; Uleman, 1987)
suggests that lawful (i.e., rule following) inferences presumably can occur
without explicit inferential intentions, and without conscious awareness of
the inference process (Newman & Uleman, 1989, p. 156): The spontaneous
trait inference that ‘‘Mary is intelligent’’ from information that she ‘‘solved
themystery half way through the novel’’ requires the inference rule ‘‘if solves a
mystery quickly then intelligent.’’ Someone who did not subscribe to that
inference rule would be unlikely to draw that specific conclusion.
Schwarz and Clore’s (1996) ‘‘feelings as information’’ model oVers an-
other instance of unconsciously mediated inferences in the realm of social
judgments. For instance, a transient mood state may be mistakenly attrib-
uted to one’s general life satisfaction (Schwarz & Clore, 1983; Schwarz,
Servay, & Kumpf, 1985) based on an IF THEN rule linking one’s feeling
state with an overall satisfaction. Or consider the well‐known use of ‘‘ease
of retrieval’’ as evidence for a trait. Schwarz et al. (1991) asked partici-
pants to recall either 6 or 12 examples of situations in which they either
behaved assertively and felt at ease, or behaved unassertively and felt insecure.
Recalling 6 examples was experienced as easy, while recalling 12 examples
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 263
was experienced as diYcult. Subsequent self‐ratings of assertiveness indicatedthat participants rated themselves as less assertive after recalling 12 rather
than 6 examples of assertive behavior. Apparently, the diYculty of recalling
12 instances implied to participants (in an IF THEN fashion) that they must
not be very assertive.
Jacoby, Kelley, Brown, and Jasechko (1989) had participants read a list
of names pertaining to nonfamous individuals. Immediately afterward or
following 1 day’s delay participants were given a diVerent list of names,
including some of the previously presented ones, as well as other nonfamous
or famous names. Especially after the delay, participants tended to misiden-
tify the nonfamous names from the original list as famous, based on an
inference from their feeling of familiarity or fluency. In most of these cases,
pa rticipant s were unawar e of the basis of their inferences leadi ng Sch warz
an d Clo re ( 1996 , p. 437) to conclude that ‘‘relia nce on experi ences g enerally
does not involve conscious attribution’’ (see also, Schwarz, 2004).
The foregoing review suggests that the distinction between associative versus
rule‐based judgments is problematic: (1) conditioning eVects originally viewed
as quintessentially ‘‘associative’’ have been generally recognized as rule‐based,that is, as a formof signal or expectancy learning (Baeyens&DeHouwer, 1995;
DeHouwer, Thomas, &Baeyens, 2001; Tolman, 1932); (2) IFTHEN judgmen-
tal rules can be routinized or ‘‘automatized,’’ and hence, occur with consider-
able eYciency (Bargh, 1996); and (3) they can operate outside of conscious
awareness, giving rise to inferences ofwhich true basis onemaynot be cognizant
(Schwarz & Clore, 1996), including perceptual judgments believed to be based
on hard wired inference rules (Gregory, 1997; Kersten et al., 2004; Pizlo, 2001;
Rock, 1983). In a recent paper, Moors and De Houwer (2006, p. 13) wondered
‘‘whether rule‐based processes and associative ones can be distinguished empir-
ically.’’ They further stated, and we agree that ‘‘If no functional diVerence canbe found between the two processes, or if no agreement can be obtained about
what this diVerence should be, rule‐based [and] associative models remain
empirically indistinguishable theories’’ (Moors and De Houwer, 2006).
E. PATTERN RECOGNITION
The phenomenon of ‘‘pattern recognition’’ has been occasionally juxtaposed
to rule‐based process (Lieberman,Gaunt,Gilbert, &Trope, 2002). But are the
two actually incompatible? Pattern recognition, after all, does constitute an
inference from a given cue‐constellation (e.g., a given set of facial features or a
given set of pathological symptoms) to an implied, perceptual, or conceptual
judgment (e.g., that the seen face belongs to an acquaintance, or that the
assembly of pathological symptoms represent a given illness). In animal
research, a similar concept of cue‐configuration is explicitly treated as an
264 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
an tecedent term of an ‘‘IF THEN’’ ru le. Holyoa k et al. ( 1989 , p. 3 19) for
instance, suggested that ‘‘configural cues are not identifiedwithperceptual units;
rather they emerge during learning as multiple‐element conditions of rules.’’
In fact, Lieberman et al. (20 02 , p. 221, emphasis added) allow that ‘‘products
of the X system’’ (assumed to operate on the basis of ‘‘pattern recognition’’)
‘‘can also be described as the result of executing ‘if then’ statements.’’
In theoretical depictions, pattern recognition is often said to depend on
constraint satisfaction, that is, on a relative fit between (1) external input stimuli
and (2) a preexisting structure of associations in memory. The activation of a
concept is said to occur whenever such fit obtains. Although the language here
may appear to diVer from the syllogistic terminology of IF THEN rules, the
contents are remarkably similar. The ‘‘preexisting structure of associations in
memory’’ represents a compound X that if aYrmed in a given instance by the
‘‘external input stimuli’’ indicates Y, that is, a given inference or conclusion.
For instance, a conjunctive presence of ‘‘elegant attire,’’ ‘‘interest in politics,’’
and ‘‘high degree of articulateness’’ may be assumed to indicate a ‘‘lawyer’’ to
an individual holding the appropriate IF THEN rule. If a newly encountered
individual presented this particular ‘‘association’’ of characteristics, this could
be regarded as an ‘‘external input stimulus’’ that fits the antecedent term of the
rule, warranting the ‘‘lawyer’’ inference.
The issue of ‘‘pattern recognition’’ recalls the question whether in a condi-
tioning context the animal responds to the situation as a whole, that is, to an
entire ‘‘Gestalt’’ versus singling out particular features of the situation in its
‘‘hypotheses’’ (Krechevsky, 1932) about the correct rule. Conditioning theor-
ists have opted for the latter view. As Holyoak et al. (1989) put it: ‘‘A rat may
receive a shock while listening to an unfamiliar tone, scratching itself, looking
left, and smelling food pellets . . . the rule ‘if tone, then expect shock’ will be
more likely be generated in this situation than the rule ‘If looking left,
scratching, and smelling pellets, then expect shock’ ’’ (Holyoak et al., 1989,
p. 320; see also, Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Thaggard, 1986).
A diVerent way to think about the problem of ‘‘pattern recognition’’ is
in terms of the kindred notion of ‘‘attribute matching,’’ and the possibi-
lity of it serving as a basis for categorization. According to Murphy and
Medin (1985), however, ‘‘Instead of attribute matching, categorization may
be based on an inference process’’ (Murphy & Medin, 1985, p. 295, emphasis
added). A major problem with the attribute matching view is that it views
categories as mere sum total of their attributes. This ‘‘ignores the problem of
how one decides what is to count as an attribute (and it involves) failing to
view concepts in terms of the relations between exemplar properties and the
categorization system: Human . . . theories are ignored’’ (Murphy & Medin,
1985, p. 295). Thus, somewhat analogously to a conditioning situation
wherein the animal ‘‘decides’’ what features of the situation should figure
in its ‘‘hypothesis’’ about the appropriate rule (Holyoak et al., 1989;
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 265
Krechevsky, 1932) so in classifying objects individuals decide, on the basis of
their prior knowledge, that is, their lay theories and the specific context of
application what counts as an instance of a category. In an example given by
M urphy and M edin (1985 , p. 295, e mphasis add ed), the same behavior
‘‘jumping into a swimming pool with one’s clothes on . . . could imply
drunkenness in one context and heroism in another (e.g., jumping into the
pool to save someone from drowning).’’ In present terms, one’s lay theory or
inference rule may indicate that if a pattern was encountered wherein
‘‘someone jumped into a swimming pool with one’s clothes on’’ and ‘‘some-
one else was drowning’’ this indicated heroism, whereas if the pattern
included ‘‘drinking,’’ ‘‘jumping into a swimming pool with one’s clothes
on,’’ and ‘‘no one drowning’’ this indicated drunkenness.
In summary, a variety of evidence and theoretical considerations across
diVerent domains of psychology converge on the notion that judgments
(whether assessed directly or through behavioral manifestations) are ruled‐based. Tomake a judgment is to go beyond the ‘‘information given’’ (Bartlett,
1932; Bruner, 1973) by using it as testimony for a conclusion in accordance
with an ‘‘IF THEN’’ statement to which the individual subscribes. Such
implicational structure appears to characterize explicit human inferences
(Anderson, 1983), implicit conclusion‐drawing (Schwarz & Clore, 1996),
conditioning responses in animal learning (Holyoak et al., 1989; Rescorla &
Wagner, 1972), and perceptual judgments of everyday objects (Gregory,
1997; Pizlo, 2001; Rock, 1983). The basic IF THEN form appears essential
to all such inferences, whether conscious or nonconscious, instantaneous or
retarded, innate or learned. It is a fundamental building block out of which all
epistemic edifices seem to be constructed.
Thus, though the terminology of ‘‘constraint satisfaction,’’ ‘‘associative pat-
terns,’’ ‘‘attribute matching,’’ and so onmay seem rather diVerent from the rule‐like language of IF THEN premises, the underlying structure of inference seems
common to all instances of judgment.
III. The Parameters of Human Judgment
The foregoing assumption implies a fundamentally unitary approach to
human judgment. Yet our emphasis on commonality is quite compatible with
variability of judgment types and of conditions wherein contextually given
information (contained in message arguments, heuristic cues, statistical data,
and so on) may aVect judgments. In what follows we seek to understand the
essence of such variability. Toward that aim, we now identify several param-
eters of the judgmental process. These are assumed to constitute continuous
dimensions present in any judgmental situation. We propose that diVerentjudgment types vary in their parameter values. Moreover, variability in the
266 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
judgmental impact of the information given depends on the particular com-
bination of parameter values characterizing a specific judgmental context.
A. INFORMATIONAL RELEVANCE
Our key parameter is the degree of informational relevance. It is intimately
tied to the notion of inference rules discussed above. Specifically, degree of
relevance that information X has for judgment Y is defined as the extent to
which the individual subscribes3 to the IF X THEN Y proposition, or the
major premise of a syllogism. We assume that the relevance of a given X to a
given Y may vary widely across persons as well as (for a given person) across
times, representing rule‐learning. In some instances, the implication may be
experienced as quite strong so that aYrming X (the minor premise) would
create a strong sense that Y too is the case. Strong inferences of this sort may
be aVorded by the way our perceptual system is hard wired (Pizlo, 2001).
Nonetheless, perceptual learning of some sort does take place (cf. Gregory,
1997; Rock, 1983), for instance, at the level of fine discriminations. This is
exemplified by a variety of perceptual expertise individuals may acquire with
practice. Such discrimination learning (e.g., in the realm of sound discrimi-
nation; Wright & Fitzgerald, 2003) may involve procedural training wherein
the rules of inference (our notion of ‘‘major premises’’) from a given stimulus
array may be appropriately augmented, and/or an improved processing may
take place of the stimulus (our notion of ‘‘minor premises’’) fitting the rules
in question . As Br uner ( 1958 , pp. 90–91) obs erved: ‘‘We learn the probab i-
listic texture of the world, conserve this learning, use it as a guide to tuning
our perceptual readiness to what is most likely next. It is this that permits us
to go beyond the information given.’’
Some inferential rules may be highly routinized via sustained practice
(Schneider & ShiVrin, 1977), others may derive from a unique personal experi-
ence (Garcia et al., 1968), or be based on pronouncement of a trusted ‘‘episte-
mic authority’’ (Kruglanski et al., 2005). With lesser degree of routinization,
a less impactful experience or a less trusted epistemic authority, the X to Y
implicationmaybeweaker andmore tenuous. In those instances, the confidence
in Y given X would be correspondingly feeble.
Prior judgmental research (reviewed subsequently) often confounded diVer-ent informational types or contents (e.g., ‘‘heuristic’’ versus ‘‘statistical’’ infor-
mation or ‘‘cue’’ versus ‘‘message’’ information) with diVerent degrees of their
3By ‘‘subscription to’’ we mean the degree of the X–Y contingency represented in the
individual’s memory, such that the subsequent activation of X in some context will tend to
evoke the expectancy of Y.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 267
potential relevance to research participants (Erb et al., 2003; Kruglanski &
Thompson, 1999a,b). If so, claims about qualitative diVerences in the judgmen-
tal process may have stemmed in part from focusing on the qualitative diVer-ences in informational contents, rather than on the quantitative diVerences inparameter values that these contents exhibited. For example, the IFTHEN rule
lending relevance to a given content of information, say about the commu-
nicator’s expertise (the ‘‘expertise heuristic’’) may be believed in less strongly
than an IF THEN rule lending relevance to a given message argument (i.e.,
a diVerent content). If the recipient had suYcient motivation and capacity to
consider both, the latter information may override in its impact the former
information (Pierro et al., 2004). We revisit this point at a later juncture.
1. Potential and Perceived Relevance
It is useful to distinguish between potential relevance that a given item of
information (X) has with respect to a given judgment (Y), and its perceived
relevance in a specific situation. Potential relevance denotes the assignment
of relevance under optimal processing conditions of attentional focus.
It represents the knower’s degree of belief in the IF X THEN Y proposition
if inquired about it directly. Often, however, conditions are suboptimal. The
individual may be unable to focus on X or detect it in the informational
array, or the IF X THEN Y rule may not be strongly activated in this
person’s mind. In such circumstances, the information’s perceived relevance
may diVer from its potential relevance, and the information’s actual impact
may not be commensurate with its potential impact.
In the classic study by Petty, Wells, and Brock (1976), high‐quality (hence
highly potentially relevant) arguments exerted lesser persuasive impact
under distraction (versus no distraction) conditions and low‐quality argu-
ments exerted greater persuasive impact under distraction (versus no distrac-
tion) conditions. In present terms, both cases reflected a discrepancy between
perceived and potential relevance under distraction (hence, reduced focus)
conditions.
B. GLEANING THE RELEVANCE OF THE INFORMATION GIVEN
Confronted with a judgmental question requiring an answer, an individual
typically attempts to glean the relevance of the information given to the judg-
mental task, that is, determines its ‘‘true’’ (potential) relevance for the judgment
at hand. How close he or she may come to divining such relevance may depend
on two factors: (1) task diYculty or ‘‘demandingness’’ and (2) processing
resources. These two factors represent our next two judgmental parameters.
268 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
Task demands constitute an external factor analogous to the weight of a
barbell. Processing resources are internal and analogous to a weight lifter’s
muscular strength and determination, aVecting whether he or she would lift
the weight to a required height.
C. TASK DEMANDS
The task at handmaydetermine how easy or diYcult it is to detect the potential
relevance to the judgmental question of the information given. Consistent with
our syllogistic analysis, it is possible to distinguish two separate sources of task
diYculty: (1) diYculty of aYrming the minor premise of the syllogism, that
is, identifying that X is the case, and (2) diYculty of activating the (IF X
THEN Y) inference rule (i.e., the major premise) that X may instantiate.
Various circumstances may obscure the identity of the critical information
X, serving as the minor premise in an inference. The stimulus package
in which such information is embedded may be highly complex and lengthy.
It may contain considerable noise, and the relevant signal (i.e., items of
relevant evidence) may be faint, or insuYciently salient to attract the knower’s
attention. The placement of the relevant informational items in the sequence
presented to the knower may also matter. A front end placement may render
the items easier to process, whereas a later placement may make their proces-
sing more diYcult due to the depletion of cognitive resources that the early
items might have eVected.For instance, in typical persuasion studies peripheral or heuristic cues have
been presented up front, and themessage arguments have come subsequently.
Moreover, the message arguments have been typically lengthier and more
complex than the cues. In a review of the relevant literature, Pierro, Mannetti,
Erb, Spiegel, and Kruglanski (2005) found this to be the case in the prepon-
derance of instances. Either length and/or complexity and/or the order of
presentation could have rendered the message arguments more diYcult to
process than the heuristic cues.
In Trope andGaunt’s (2000) attributional research, saliency of information
was manipulated via the modality in which it was presented. The auditory
modality rendered the critical information (about contextual pressures ap-
plied on an actor) more salient, and hence easier to process, than information
presented in a visual modality (the written text). In work on judgment under
uncertainty (Kahneman, 2003; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), the base rate
information was often presented briefly and up front, whereas the heuristic,
‘‘representativeness’’ information typically appeared later in a relatively
lengthy vignette. This might have rendered the ‘‘representativeness’’ informa-
tion more challenging to process than the base rate information (for reviews
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 269
see Chun &Kruglanski, 2006; Erb et al., 2003). In person perception research
(Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990), the category information was often
presented briefly and early and the individuating information about the target
subsequently and/or more extensively (Neuberg & Fiske, 1987). This, again,
suggests that the two information types (i.e., ‘‘category’’ and ‘‘individuating’’
information) might have diVered in processing diYculty. In the realm of
visual perception, correct identification of objects can be easier or more
diYcult (Dosher, Liu, Blair, & Lu, 2004; Posner, 1980), depending on lumi-
nosity, external noise, or whether the target region was cued in advance of the
stimulus presentation (Santhi & Reeves, 2004), and so on.
The inference rules lending the ‘‘information given’’ relevance to a judg-
ment may also be more likely activated in some contexts than in others. Thus,
some environmental stimuli more than others may prime specific inference
rules (Higgins, 1996) or serve as retrieval cues for such rules. Too, diVerentframings of a problem may prime diVerent rules leading to the utilization of
diVerent types of information (e.g., of statistical versus ‘‘psychological’’ in-
formation) (Hilton, 1995; Schwarz et al., 1991). Contexts that prime or
increase the retrieval likelihood of given inference rules increase the ease with
which such rules will be applied, hence lessen the diYculty of the judgmental
task involved.
In summary, some judgmental tasks are more demanding than others. The
reason that this matters is because in much judgmental research diVerentcontents of information inadvertently diVered in their processing diYculty.
Because diVerence in content is qualitative by definition, it is possible that
claims for qualitatively diVerent processes of judgment often rested on the
confounding of informational contents with task demands in which the latter
rather than the former was actually responsible for judgmental outcomes.We
revisit this issue in a subsequent section, describing our empirical work in the
present conceptual paradigm.
D. COGNITIVE RESOURCES
Successful gleaning of informational relevance may be importantly deter-
mined by individuals’ own capabilities in a given context. Two major classes
of capability factors may be distinguished related to: (1) rule accessibility and
(2) attentional capacity.
1. Rule Accessibility
As noted earlier, potential relevance of information given concerns the
strength with which the individual subscribes to an IF THEN rule‐linkingconceptual categories to each other. But individuals’ readiness to apply a
270 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
given rule (Bruner, 1957) might be low in which case the judgmental rele-
vance of the information given might go unrecognized. The readiness of rule
application depends on its accessibility from chronic or acute sources
(Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989; Higgins, 1996; Wood, Kallgren, &
Pr eisler, 1985 ). For insta nce, in a study by Chaik en et al. (1988) ‘‘sub jects
classified as chronic users of the length‐strength rule agreed more with a
message that ostensibly contained many (versus few) arguments, especially
after exposure to a task that primed this heuristic. In contrast, chronic nonusers
of this rule were nomore persuaded by the long message than by the short one,
regardless ofwhether the length‐strength heuristic hador hadnot been primed’’
(Chaiken et al., 1989, pp. 217–218).
In research on judgme nt unde r uncerta inty, Trope and Ginossar ( 1988 ,
p. 227) reviewed studies suggesting that ‘‘the influence of statistical rules, like
the influence of any rule depends on their prior activation (accessibility) and
their concurrent activation.’’ Presumably, that is so because the more acces-
sible a given (in principle available) rule, the greater one’s readiness to apply
it, whereas the application of less accessible rules may require laborious
retrieval work.
2. Attentional Capacity
An individual whose attentional capacity is taxed (e.g., by cognitive
busyness with other matters) may be less able to thoroughly process and
hence to adequately glean the relevance of the information given under high‐demand conditions. This may reduce the diVerence in impact of highly judg-
mentally relevant versus less judgmentally relevant information. Research by
Petty et al. (1976) referred to earlier demonstrated that under distraction
(versus no distraction) conditions, individuals were less sensitive to quality of
the message arguments. Cognitive capacity may depend also on circadian
rhythm (Bodenhausen, 1990), one’s degree ofmental fatigue (Webster,Richter,
& Kruglanski, 1996), alcoholic intoxication (Steele & Josephs, 1990), and the
degree of depletion by prior activities (Baumeister, Muraven, & Tice, 2000).
The foregoing factors may reduce individuals’ processing capacity, hence in-
crease the diYculty of ‘‘gleaning,’’ the potential relevance of the information
given to the judgment at hand.
Whereas the factor of rule accessibility, considered earlier, is related to the
major premise of a syllogism, attentional capacity pertains both to the indi-
vidual’s ability to aYrm the minor premise (by appropriately identifying the
information given as the antecedent term of the rule) and to considering the
minor and the major premises jointly, that is, carrying out the reasoning
process from evidence to conclusion.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 271
E. MOTIVATION: NONDIRECTIONAL AND DIRECTIONAL
Whether stemming from external task demands or from internal processing
limitations, gleaning diYculty may be compensated for by one’s motivation
to make sense of the information. Motivation determines (1) the extent of
eVort put into information processing and (2) the weights assigned to
diVerent informational items as function of their compatibility with the
individuals’ various wishes and desires. The former eVect is a function of
one’s nondirectional motivation and the latter of one’s directional motivation
(see Kruglanski, 1989, 1996, 2004 for reviews).
Individuals’ extent of nondirectional motivation to thoroughly process
information is determined by their various information‐processing goals,
such as the goal of accuracy (Chaiken et al., 1989; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986),
accountability (Tetlock, 1985), cognitive activity (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982),
evaluation (Jarvis & Petty, 1996), or closure (Kruglanski, 2004; Kruglanski &
Webster, 1996; Kruglanski, Pierro, Mannetti, & De Grada, 2006; Webster
& Kruglanski, 1998). For instance, the higher the magnitude of the goals of
accuracy or cognitive activity, the greater the degree of the processing moti-
vation. By contrast, the higher the magnitude of the goal of closure, the lesser
the degree of processing motivation.
Directional motivation reflects the degree to which given contents of judg-
ment are desired by the individual. DiVerential weight given to informati-
onal items as function of their congruence with a given directional motivation
may result in bias aimed at bringing judgments in line with the individual’s
wishes and desires. For instance, an individual informed that coVee drinkingis unhealthy (or healthy) may appropriately distort her or his recollection of
coVee drinking instances (Kunda & Sanitioso, 1989) so as to reach a desirable
conclusion (see alsoDunning, 1999;Kruglanski, 1999;Kunda&Sinclair, 1999).
Finally, a recent review (Kersten et al., 2004, p. 284) remarked that: ‘‘object
perception shows biases consistent with preferred views.’’ The notion that
perceptual judgments are susceptible to motivational influences is compatible
with the functional understanding of perception. In this vein, ProYtt and
colleagues have found that the perception of slants of hills and of distances
is aVected by whether the perceiver is wearing a heavy backpack (ProYtt,
Stefanucci, Banton, & Epstein, 2003), is old or young (Bhalla & ProYtt,
1999), is fatigued (ProYtt, Bhalla, Gossweiler, & Midgett, 1995), or contem-
plates action goals (Witt, ProYtt, & Epstein, 2004). Such perceptual biases may
guide the mobilization of resources needed for motivated action, and in this
sense are functional. In summary then, directional motivational eVects havebeen observed at diVerent levels of psychological phenomena, including the
very basic ones in the realm of perception.
272 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
As the judgmental activity unfolds, magnitude of processing motivation may
be determined by the desirability of initially formed beliefs. Should these be
desirable‐the individual would be disinclined to engage in further information
processing, lest current conclusions be undermined by further data. On the other
hand, should the initial beliefs be undesirable‐the individual would be inclined
to process further information that hopefully would serve to sweep away the
initial, unpalatable notions (Ditto and Lopez, 1992). In other words, direction-
al motivation may determine the degree of work individuals are prepared to
invest in information processing en route to a judgment.
F. PROPERTIES OF THE JUDGMENTAL PARAMETERS
1. Multiple Determination of Parameter Values
As presently conceived, the judgmental parameters constitute quantitative
continua whose specific values are determined by diverse factors: A given
informational stimulus may aVord a strong inference because its perceived
relevance was innately ‘‘wired into’’ the human perceptual system, because
such relevance was learned over repeated experience (Neal et al., 2006), or be-
cause it was derived from highly regarded ‘‘epistemic authority’’ (Kruglanski
et al., 2005), and so on. Similarly, task demands could be multiply determined
by informational complexity, signal to noise ratio, ordinal position, or percep-
tual modality. Cognitive capacity could be determined by rule accessibility, in
turn aVected by the recency or frequency of its activation (Higgins, 1996), and/
or by cognitive capacity determined by cognitive load, fatigue, and depletion
occasioned by prior pursuits (Baumeister et al., 2000). Motivation could be
determined by expectancies and values attached to a variety of judgmental
outcomes and processes, for example to the cognitive activity itself (Cacioppo
& Petty, 1982), to cognitive closure (Kruglanski, 2004; Kruglanski &Webster,
1996), accuracy (Funder, 1987; Kruglanski, 1989), accountability (Tetlock,
1985), impression management (Chaiken et al., 1989), ego enhancement
(Kunda, 1990), and so on.
This heterogeneity notwithstanding, we are assuming that as far as infor-
mation’s impact is concerned, diverse determinants of a given parameter’s
values are functionally equivalent. From this perspective, it matters not why a
given information is subjectively relevant to a given judgment, why a given
judgmental task is demanding for an individual, why an individual’s cogni-
tive resources at a given moment are ample or sparse, why an individual is
motivated or unmotivated to expend eVorts on the processing of given
judgmentally relevant information, it matters only that the above parameter
values occur at given magnitudes.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 273
2. Orthogonality of the Parameters
We assume further that the judgmental parameters are orthogonal and that
their values derive from largely independent determinants. Thus, subjective‐relevance of information may derive from a prior forging of conditional IF
THEN links between informational categories, the magnitude of processing
motivation may derive from various goals that persons might have, task
demands may depend on nature of the problem posed, and the stimulus
context, and cognitive resources may depend on rule accessibility and cognitive
busyness, all representing very diVerent concerns.Nonetheless, under some conditions the parameters may exert influence on
one another. For instance, highly relevant information might be used more
frequently than less relevant information, resulting in its greater accessibility,
in turn elevating the level of the cognitive resource parameter. Conversely,
high accessibility of information might increase its perceived relevance in some
contexts, for example by lending it experiential ‘‘fluency’’ (Jacoby et al., 1989;
Schwarz & Clore, 1996).
A given bit of informationmay be perceived as more relevant to a judgment
the more congruent it is with the knower’s wishes and desires (Lord, Ross, &
Lepper, 1979). Thus, in order to justify their ‘‘freezing’’ on early information
persons under high need for closure might perceive it as more relevant to a
judgment at hand than persons under low need for closure (Webster &
Kruglanski, 1998). By contrast, persons with a high need for cognition
(Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) may perceive the early information as less relevant,
in order that they may carry on with their information‐processing activity.
Finally, limited cognitive capacity may reduce processing motivation or
induce a need for cognitive closure (cf. Kruglanski & Webster, 1996), and
so on. Despite these interrelations, however, the judgmental parameters
are relatively independent because for the most part their determinants are
unique or nonoverlapping.
3. Independence of Informational Contents
Inevitably, some parametric values characterize some informational con-
tents. For instance, low‐task demands and/or subjective relevance may have
characterized in prior research ‘‘peripheral’’ or ‘‘heuristic’’ cues, whereas
higher task demands and subjective relevance may have characterized ‘‘mes-
sage or issue information’’ (Chaiken et al., 1989; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
For many individuals (lacking statistical know how), low degrees of per-
ceived relevance may characterize statistical information (e.g., base rates)
(Erb et al., 2003; Hilton, 1995). High saliency and hence low‐processing
274 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
demands may characterize social category information in some cases
(Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990), and so on.
From the present perspective, it is essential to conceptually distinguish
between parametric values and the contents to which such values may be
attached in some contexts. Whereas some parametric values must charac-
terize any informational contents, the very same values (e.g., a given degree
of subjective relevance, task demands, and motivational significance) may
characterize numerous alternative contents as well. Moreover, it is the
parametric values rather than the contents that determine the judgmental
impact of information. In other words, a given combination of parameter
values is assumed to have the same degree of impact across diVerent possiblecontents having those same values. By contrast, the same informational
contents, if characterized by diVerent parameter values (e.g., the same
information diVering in subjective relevance or degree of motivational
significance to diVerent knowers), are assumed to diVer in their judgmental
impact.
G. MULTIDIMENSIONAL PARAMETRIC SPACE
It is possible to conceptualize the constellations of parametric values char-
acterizing diVerent judgmental contexts as points in a multidimensional
space defined by the present quasi‐orthogonal parameters. Each such point
is assumed to diVer from all the others in the impact the associated informa-
tional contents will create. Whereas in theory each of our continuous param-
eters allows an open ended amount of fine gradations, in practice we have
identified some relatively coarse parametric regions and compared them in
empirical research (e.g., by comparing the impact of a highly demanding
information conjoined to high‐ (versus low‐) processing motivation and/or
cognitive resources).
In summary, we have listed five general parameters whose joint operation
may determine whether and to what extent the information given would
aVect judgments. These are: (1) the subjective relevance of the information,
(2) task demands, (3) cognitive resources, (4) nondirectional, and (5) direc-
tional motivation. Each parameter is assumed (1) to constitute a quantitative
continuum, (2) to be represented at some value in each judgmental situation,
(3) to be (largely) orthogonal to the remaining parameters, (4) to be multiply
determined, and (5) conceptually independent of informational contents to
which it happens to be associated. In the next section, we outline a set of
specific postulates and derivations concerning the role our parameters play
in determining the judgmental impact of the information given.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 275
IV. A Parametric Model of Social Judgment
A. THE ROLE OF SUBJECTIVE RELEVANCE
4B
rule
aYrm
Postulate 1: Judgmental impact of information is a positive function
of its degree of perceived relevance in a given context.
Derivation 1 (from Postulate 1): The impact of the information given
will depend on the likelihood of its relevance being adequately
perceived.
In turn, such likelihood will be determined by the degree to which the informa-
tion is accessible in memory and instantiated with respect to a given object of
judgment.4 Evidence for this derivation comes from three studies completed
byKopetz andKruglanski (2006), investigating an eVect originally reported byPavelchak (1989), and oVered in support of a dual‐mode model of impression
formation. In the first session of Pavelchak’s (1989) experiment, participants
rated the likeability of 35 academic majors and 50 personality traits. In the
second session carried out 10–14 days later, participantswere presentedwith six
stimulus persons, each portrayed via four traits. In the category condition,
participants first guessed the targets’ academic majors, then rated their like-
ability. In the piecemeal condition, participants rated the targets’ likeability
after exposure to their traits but before guessing their majors. It was found that
participants in the category condition (those who categorized the targets prior
to rating their likeability) made likeability ratings that were more consistent
with the categories’ likeability than with the likeability of the traits. Partici-
pants, in the piecemeal condition, made likeability ratings that were more
congruent with the likeability of the traits than with the likeability of the
categories. Pavelchak (1989, p. 361) viewed these results as ‘‘clear evidence that
there are two distinctmodes of person evaluation: one computed from attribute
evaluations and one based on category evaluations.’’
It is possible, however, that the findings were due to diVerential accessibilityof the category and the trait information in Pavelchak’s (1989) two condi-
tions. Because in the category condition, participants made their likeability
ratings immediately after exposure to the targets’ guessed categories, category
information may have been more recent and hence more accessible in their
memory than the trait information. Similarly, because in the piecemeal
y instantiation is meant applicability to a given object of judgment, thus if the inference
states that ‘‘if X then Y,’’ instantiation with respect to an object A would amount to
ing that A is X (and hence that Y is expected).
276 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
condition participants made their likeability ratings immediately after expo-
sure to the targets’ presented traits, trait information may have been more
recent and hence more accessible in their memories than category informa-
tion. In other words, Pavelchak’s (1989) results could have been due to
diVerential accessibility rather than to qualitative diVerences in processing
category and trait information as implied by the dual‐mode approach.
To test this possibility,Kopetz andKruglanski’s (2006) first study carried out
an extended replication of Pavelchak’s (1989) two sessions experiment. During
the first session, participants evaluated the likeability of 48 academic majors
and 66 personality traits. In the second session, taking place 10–14 days later,
participants in a replication condition were presented with six stimulus persons
characterized by two personality traits and were asked either (1) to guess the
target person’s likely academicmajor and then to rate the person’s likeability or
(2) to rate the target’s likeability and then guess this individual’s likelymajor. In
two novel conditions, the targets were characterized by two academic majors
and asked (3) to guess the target’s most likely trait, and then rate this indivi-
dual’s likeability, or (4) to rate the target’s likeability and then to guess this
individual’s most likely trait.
The replication condition obtained results similar to those of Pavelchak
(1989). Participants who guessed the target’s category prior to rating this
person’s likeability exhibited smaller deviation of rated likeability from liking
for the category than liking for the traits, whereas those who guessed the
target’s category (this person’s major) after exposure to the traits but before
guessing the category exhibited smaller deviation of the target’s rated liking
from the traits’ (versus the category’s) likeability. A reversal of these findings
obtained in Kopetz and Kruglanski’s (2006) novel conditions: Where parti-
cipants guessed the target’s trait prior to rating her or his likeability, there
was smaller deviation of rated likeability from liking for the trait (versus
liking for the categories). However, where participants rated the target’s
likeability prior to guessing her or his likely trait, there obtained a smaller
deviation of the target’s rated likeability from liking for the categories (versus
liking for the trait). These findings are illustrated in Fig. 1.
In Kopetz and Kruglanski’s (2006) subsequent study, participants rated in
the first session the likeability of various traits and majors. In the same
session, participants were presented with six target persons each depicted
via four personality traits and were asked to guess each person’s academic
major. In a second session (10–14 days later), participants were presentedwith
the same target persons described in terms of the same traits and categories
(in counterbalanced order). Whereas in the prior study we manipulated the
presentation order of specific categories or specific traits pertaining to the
targets, in the present study we primed the general constructs of ‘‘categories,’’
or ‘‘traits’ ’’ by having participants, prior to rating their liking for the targets
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
Deg
ree
of d
evia
tion
Trait-category-judgement
Trait-judgement-
category
Category-trait-judgement
Category-judgement-trait
Category deviation Piecemeal deviation
Fig. 1. Deviation of six targets’ rated likeability from the likeability of the target’s categories
(college majors) and descriptive traits (Kopetz & Kruglanski, 2006, Study 1).
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
Deg
ree
of d
evia
tion
Category prime Trait prime
Category deviation Piecemeal deviation
Fig. 2. Deviation of six targets’ rated likeability from the likeability of the target’s categories
(college majors) and descriptive traits as function of priming the concepts of ‘‘category’’ versus
‘‘traits’’ (Kopetz & Kruglanski, 2006, Study 2).
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 277
278 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
either categorize 20 diVerent objects into groups or describe 20 diVerentobjects in terms of their traits. The results (see Fig. 2) showed that when the
concept of ‘‘category’’ was primed, participants liking of the target persons
was less deviant from their liking for the target’s category (i.e., her or his
major) than from their liking for the target’s traits, whereas when the concept
of ‘‘trait’’ was primed, participants liking of the target persons was less
deviant from their liking for the targets’ traits than from their liking for the
target’s category.
In the third and final study using a similar two session paradigm, Kopetz
and Kruglanski (2006) investigated the notion that accessibility of informa-
tion is likely to increase its impact only to the extent that the information
appears to apply to, or is instantiated for, the specific target of judgment:
After having rated in the first session, the likeability of various traits and
major categories in the second session participants evaluated six stimulus
persons each depicted via two academic majors or two personality traits.
To assess credibility, participants also rated the most likely and the most
unlikely academic major of the six stimulus persons depicted via the traits,
and themost likely traits for the six persons depicted via the academic majors.
At that point, participants were shown a picture of each target person and
asked to rate her or his likeability. Concomitantly with the presentation
of the picture, participants were subliminally primed with either the most
likely or the most unlikely major for targets depicted via the traits, or the
most likely or the most unlikely trait for targets depicted via the majors.
It was found (see Fig. 3A) that when participants were presented with
targets depicted by traits and then primed with their academic majors,
participants liking for the targets was less deviant from liking for the primed
categories than the depicted traits, but only when the categories were instan-
tiated for the specific target, that is were consistent with the target’s alleged
traits. Similarly, when participants were presented with targets depicted by
the categories (see Fig. 3B), their liking for those targets was less deviant
from liking for the primed traits than liking for the targets’ categories but,
again, only when the primed traits were instantiated for the specific target,
that is, when they were consistent with the categories to which each target
person was said to belong.
In summary, the Kopetz and Kruglanski (2006) studies support the notion
that Pavelchak’s (1989) results may have been due to the diVerential accessi-bility of category and trait information rather than due to a fundamental
diVerence in the way in which these two information types are processed.
Our experiments suggest that both types of information have greater impact
when they are perceived to instantiate the minor premise of the syllogism
that lends them relevance. In turn, the likelihood of such a perception
depends on the accessibility of the information and its consistency with what
is already known about a given target of judgment.
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
1.4
Deg
ree
of d
evia
tion
Category-consistenttraits
Category-inconsistenttraits
Deg
ree
of d
evia
tion
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
Traits-consistentcategory
Traits-inconsistentcategory
A
B
Category deviation Piecemeal deviation
Category deviation Piecemeal deviation
Fig. 3. (A) Deviation of six targets’ rated likeability from the likeability of the target’s traits‐consistent versus traits‐inconsistent primed categories. (B) Deviation of six targets’ rated like-
ability from the likeability of the targets’ category‐consistent versus category‐inconsistentprimed traits (Kopetz & Kruglanski, 2006, Study 3).
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 279
Derivation 2 (from Postulate 1): Assuming that the (potential) relevance
of information is adequately perceived, more subjectively relevant informa-
tion will exert greater judgmental impact than less subjectively relevant
information.
280 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
Though seemingly straightforward and simple, this derivation illuminates
some intriguing findings in social cognition. These have to do with the
shifting conditions under which the same information will exert greater or
lesser impact.
1. Teaching Relevance
We assume that the potential relevance of information is not fixed and that it
can be altered through learning. Pertinent in this connection is work by
Nisbett, Fong, Lehman, & Cheng (1987) and by Sedlmeier (1999) on the
successful teaching of statistical reasoning. From the present perspective,
such teaching imparts statistical rules to individuals hence it strengthens
the ‘‘IF THEN’’ connections between statistical concepts (e.g., the base rates
of some event’s occurrence) and likelihood judgments. Indeed, research
has demonstrated that teaching statistical reasoning results in an increased
use of statistica l infor mation . As Se dlmeier ( 1999 , p. 190) ex pressed it:
‘‘The pessimistic outlook of the heuristics and biases approach cannot be
maintained . . . Training about statistical reasoning can be eVective.’’
2. Framing EVects
Contextual relevance of diVerent types of information can be inferred from
the framing of the situation, that is, from the way the situation is appre-
hended by the individual. From this perspective, neglect of statistical infor-
mation (e.g., the base rates) and the tendency to rely on individuating profile
(representativeness) information in early studies (Tversky & Kahneman,
1974) might have stemmed from a ‘‘psychological’’ framing of the problem.
Consistent with this possibility, work by Hilton and Slugoski (2001),
Schwarz et al. (1991), and by Zukier and Pepitone (1984) established that
framing the same problems as ‘‘statistical’’ or ‘‘scientific’’ appreciably reduces
the neglect of statistical information.
The key role of subjective relevance in determining the judgmental impact of
statistical information hardly escaped the attention of researchers (cf. Borgida
& Brekke, 1981). For instance, Bar‐Hillel (1990, p. 201) concluded that
base‐rates are by and large neglected if and when they are considered to be irrelevant
to the prediction at hand furthermore in the tasks that dominate laboratory studies of
base rate neglect, base rates provide only a general informational background on
which other information, which typically pertains more directly or specifically to the
target case, is added. Such information tends to render the arbitrary base rates
subjectively irrelevant . . . (emphasis added).
From the present perspective, the subjective relevance parameter applies as
much to statistical information as it does to ‘‘heuristics’’ to which ‘‘statistics’’
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 281
are often juxtaposed.Whichever of these two information types would appear
more relevant to the judgment at hand is likely to be used as evidence for the
judgment. Ginossar and Trope (1980) discovered, for example, that when the
individuating vignette (the ‘‘representativeness’’ information) was rendered
nondiagnostic, and hence subjectively irrelevant to determining the target’s
profession, participants did utilize the base rates. We revisit at a later juncture
the issue of relative (subjective) relevance of diVerent information types.
3. Trait Centrality in Impression Formation
The phenomenon of trait centrality (Asch, 1946), long regarded as a major
psychological insight into person perception, turns out to be a matter of
subjective relevance as well. In otherwords, a given stimulus trait (e.g., ‘‘warm’’
or ‘‘cold’’) impacts personality impressions (e.g., that the target is friendly or
cooperative) to the extent that it implies the impressions in question (Wishner,
1960; Zanna & Hamilton, 1972). In this sense, the well‐known ‘‘warm‐cold’’eVect is nonunique. For instance, whereas ‘‘warmth’’ but not ‘‘speed’’ may
generally imply ‘‘friendliness,’’ ‘‘speed’’ but not ‘‘warmth’’ may generally imply
‘‘athleticism.’’ In this vein, Fishbach, Kruglanski, and Chun (2005, Study 1)
found that informing participants that a target is (among other characteristics)
‘‘warm’’ versus ‘‘cold’’ led them to conclude that she is also ‘‘friendly,’’ ‘‘like-
able,’’ and so on. Including in the same trait list the information that the target
is ‘‘fast’’ versus ‘‘slow,’’ however, had no eVect on these personality dimensions.
By contrast, including in the same trait list the information that Mike, a
candidate for a basketball team, is ‘‘fast’’ versus ‘‘slow’’ led participants to
infer that he is a good prospect for the team, and is characterized by other
athletic traits, whereas information that she is ‘‘warm’’ versus ‘‘cold’’ had no
eVect on this and related judgments (see Fig. 4).
4. Subjective Relevance and Lay Theories
As the term suggests, subjective relevance may vary across individuals in
accordance with their lay theories about implicational IF THEN relations
among categories. In this vein, Fishbach et al. (2005, Study 2) found
that people’s lay theories about the degree to which ‘‘warmth’’ implies
‘‘friendship,’’ or ‘‘fastness’’ implies ‘‘basketball ability’’ mediated the relation
between a list including the ‘‘warm’’ versus ‘‘cold’’ items and judgments of
friendship, and between a list including the ‘‘fast’’ versus ‘‘slow’’ items and
judgments of basketball potential (see Fig. 5).
Ginossar andTrope (1980) assessed the degree towhich participants possessed
the sampling rule that links base rates to probability judgments. ‘‘It turned out
thatmost subjects based their estimates on the base rate frequencies, but a sizable
3
4
5
6
Warm Cold Fast Slow
Trait information
Eva
luat
ion
Basketball player Friend
Fig. 4. Evaluation of target as a function of trait information and impression task (Fishbach
et al., 2006, Study 1).
Trait:warm versus
fast
Interest infriendship
Perceivedpredictive
value
.08 (.54**)
.84** (.61**)
.54*
Trait:fast versus
warm
Interest inrecruiting
Perceivedpredictive
value
.11 (.38*)
.71** (.64**)
.73**
Fig. 5. Mediation of impressions by lay theories (Fishbach et al., 2006, Study 2). *p < .05;
**p < .01. Note: numbers in parentheses are zero‐order standardized �s.
282 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 283
minority did not’’ (Trope &Ginossar, 1988, p. 215). Consistent with the present
analysis, participants who possessed the sampling rule exhibited greater utiliza-
tion of the base rates than ones who did not possess the rule. These results
demonstrate, again, that the subjective relevance of information (in this case
base rate information) may vary across people, and that it determines their
judgments in response to the information given.
B. THE ROLE OF TASK DEMANDS AND
PROCESSING RESOURCES
Postulate 2: The likelihood of recognizing the potential relevance of
the information given is a direct function of one’s cognitive resources
and one’s processing motivation and is an inverse function of task
demands.
Definition: Let the combination of cognitive resources and processing motivation
defined an individual’s processing potential
Derivation 3 (from Postulates 1 and 2): The higher the task demands, the greater the
processing potential needed for the information given to exert judgmental impact
correspondent with its potential relevance.
Corollary toDerivation 3:Where the processing potential is insuYcient given the level of
task demands, the information given will fail to exert judgmental impact commensurate
with its potential relevance.
1. Persuasion Research
A pervasive finding in persuasion research has been that ‘‘peripheral’’ or
‘‘heuristic’’ cues exert judgmental impact (i.e., eVect change in recipients’
attitudes or opinions) under conditions of low‐processing resources, for exam-
ple where recipients’ interest in the task is low, when they are cognitively busy
or distracted, when their need for cognition is low, and so on. By contrast,
‘‘message arguments’’ have been found to exert their eVects typically under
conditions of high‐processing potential (e.g., high interest in the task, or ample
cognitive capacity).
In reviews of these studies (Erb et al., 2003; Kruglanski & Thompson,
1999a,b; Kruglanski, Thompson, & Spiegel, 1999; Kruglanski, Chen et al.,
2006; Pierro et al., 2005), it became apparent, however, that often in persua-
sion research the type of the information (i.e., ‘‘peripheral’’ or ‘‘heuristic’’
cues versus message arguments) was confounded with task demands.
Because the message arguments were typically lengthier, more complex,
and were placed later in the informational sequence, their processing may
have imposed higher processing demands than the processing of ‘‘cues’’ that
284 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
were typically brief, simple, and presented up front. When these confound-
ings were experimentally removed, the previously found diVerences betweenconditions under which the ‘‘cues’’ versus the ‘‘message arguments’’ (or vice
versa) exerted their persuasive eVects were eliminated.
In one study (Kruglanski and Thompson, 1999a, Study 4), brief expertise
information conveyed by the communicator’s status (professor in a high‐versus low‐prestige university) was followed by a lengthy expertise informa-
tion presented via the speaker’s curriculum vitae. Under cognitive load that
limited recipients’ processing resources, the brief expertise information
aVected judgments, whereas the lengthy expertise information did not.
In the absence of cognitive load, by contrast, it was the lengthy expertise
information that impacted judgments but not the brief expertise informa-
tion. In another study (Pierro et al., 2005, Study 1), it was found that brief
message arguments impacted judgments under low‐motivational involve-
ment in the issue (hence, under low‐processing resources), whereas lengthy
subsequent arguments impacted judgments under high‐motivational involve-
ment (hence, high‐processing resources). Other studies obtained similar
resul ts (for a review see Krugla nski et al., 2006).
In a recent study, Pierro, Mannetti, and Kruglanski (2006) extended this
work to examine the eVects of length (and hence diYculty) of processing
information about an expert or an inexpert source and the degree of motiva-
tional involvement on (1) attitude stability over time and (2) attitude behavior
relations. In the first phase of the study, participants received an appeal from a
person introduced via a brief or a lengthy curriculum vitae that implied him to
be an expert or an inexpert in psychological science (a full professor in cognitive
psychology at theUniversity ofMilan versus an instructor in the psychology of
tourism at a technical institute).
The appeal introduced a novel proposal to institute a compulsory partici-
pation in psychology experiments for psychology majors at Italian univer-
sities. In the high‐involvement condition, participants were led to believe
that the new program is about to begin next year, and hence that they
themselves would be aVected. In the low‐involvement condition, participants
were told that the program will commence 5 years hence, and hence that it
would not apply to them. Participants were also invited to participate in an
experiment said to take place a month later.
In the first phase of the study, following the presentation of the persuasive
appeal (the same in all conditions) participants’ attitudes and behavioral inten-
tions to participate in the experiment were measured. The attitude results repli-
cated and extended those of Pierro et al. (2005). Participants presented with the
brief expertise information showed more positive attitudes toward the proposal
and corresponding behavioral intentions, as a function of source expertise under
low involvement but not under high involvement,whereas participants presented
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 285
with the lengthy expertise information showed more positive attitudes and
behavioral intentions as a function of source expertise under high involvement
but not under low involvement.
Of greater interest were the attitude and intention data collected at phase 2,
conducted 3 weeks later. As shown in Figs. 6 and 7, the attitudes and
behavioral intentions of the brief information participants showed no eVectof expertise in either the low‐ or the high‐involvement conditions attesting to
low attitude stability (as predicted by the ELM). By contrast, the attitudes
and intentions of the lengthy information participants exhibited an eVect ofexpertise in the high‐ but not in the low‐involvement condition.
Finally, as shown in Fig. 8, the actual behavior assessed a month following
the persuasive manipulation revealed an eVect of source expertise only for
high‐involvement participants who received the lengthy source information.
Appropriate multiple regression results yielded similar results suggesting
together that attitude stability and the consistency between attitudes and
behavior depend on the relation between task demands and individuals’ pro-
cessing potential (operationalized in this study via motivational involvement).
The extensive elaboration that occurs when the task demands are consider-
able and when the processing potential is high increases the robustness of the
attitudes formed as manifested in their stability over time and their ability to
predict behavior. Thus, the eVects predicted by the ELM for message argu-
ments (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) seem to also hold for source information of
Atti
tude
cha
nge
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Brief-lowinvolvement
Brief-highinvolvement
Long-lowinvolvement
Long-highinvolvement
Inexpert Expert
Fig. 6. Attitude change 3 weeks after the exposure to the persuasive message as a function of
length of the message, source expertise, and involvement (Pierro et al., 2006).
Beh
avio
ral i
nten
tions
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
0
9
Brief-low involvement
Brief-high involvement
Long-low involvement
Long-high involvement
Inexpert Expert
Fig. 7. Behavioral intentions 3 weeks after the exposure to the persuasive message as a
function of length of the message, source expertise, and involvement (Pierro et al., 2006).
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
0
80
Beh
avio
r
Brief-low involvement
Brief-high involvement
Long-low involvement
Long-high involvement
Inexpert Expert
Fig. 8. Behavior 1 month after the exposure to the persuasive message as a function of
length of the message, source expertise, and involvement (Pierro et al., 2006).
286 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
comparable processing diYculty. Considered collectively with the bulk of
prior persuasion research (Chaiken, Wood, & Eagly, 1996), these findings
support the hypothesis that appreciating the (subjective) relevance of the
information given (e.g., the diVerence between communication from an
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 287
expert versus a nonexpert) hence enabling it to exert its eVects on attitudes
and behaviors depends on the match between recipients’ (cognitive and
motivational) processing resources and the demands of the information
processing task.
2. Dispositional Attributions
A major question posed by attribution researchers concerned the process
whereby a given behavior emitted by an actor is causally ascribed to the
situational context, or to the actor’s disposition. In this vein, Trope (1986)
reviewed evidence that ambiguous behaviors tend to be disambiguated by an
assimilation to the context in which they are taking place. For instance, an
ambiguous facial expression is likely to be perceived as sad if the context is sad
as well (e.g., a funeral) and as happy if the context was happy (e.g., a party).
Once the behavior had been identified, however, and the question of its
causal origin was pondered, the context should play a subtractive (rather an
assimilative) role in determining the behavior’s causal attribution. Specifi-
cally, the role of the context is subtracted to determine the role of the actor’s
disposition in producing the behavior. For instance, if the context was sad,
an individual’s sad expression would tend not to be attributed to the actor’s
dispositional sadness because other persons in the same situation would
probably seem sad as well.
Of present interest, Trope and Alfieri (1997) found that the assimilative
process of behavior identification was independent of cognitive load, whereas
the subtractive process of dispositional attribution was undermined by load.
These investigators also found that invalidating the contextual information did
notmanage to erase its eVect on the behavioral identification,whereas it did eraseit on the dispositional attribution. Two alternative explanations may account
for these results: (1) that the two processes are qualitatively distinct and (2) that
for some reason the behavior identification task in Trope and Alfieri’s (1997)
studies was less demanding than the dispositional attribution task, hence that it
was less sensitive to load, and perhaps carried out more automatically and hence
less impacted by subsequent (invalidating) information.
Consistent with the latter interpretation, Trope and Gaunt (2000) discov-
ered that when demands associated with the dispositional attribution task
were lowered (e.g., by increasing the salience of the information given), the
subtraction of context from dispositional attributions was no longer aVectedby load. Furthermore, Chun, Spiegel, andKruglanski (2002) found that when
the behavior identification task was made more diYcult (e.g., by decreasing
the salience of the information given) it too was undermined by load. More-
over, under those conditions invalidating the information on which the
behavioral identifications were based managed to undo those identifications.
288 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
These findings are consistent with the notion that when a judgmental task
(e.g., of ‘‘behavior identification’’ or of ‘‘dispositional attribution’’) is suY-ciently demanding, its adequate performance requires cognitive resources
and can be undermined by load. Furthermore, addressing such a task can
be a conscious, deliberative process registered in awareness. Consequently,
invalidating the informational input into this process is likely to be taken
into account, resulting in appropriate adjustments to the judgments rendered.
When the task is substantially less demanding, however, it requires correspond-
ingly less resources, possibly to the point of immunity from interference by
(some degrees of ) load. Furthermore, under such conditions the process may
occur so quickly and subconsciously that its details are not fully encoded.
Hence, invalidating the informational input into this process may not occasion
corrective adjustments to the pertinent judgments.
3. Base‐Rate Neglect
We have suggested that the judgmental impact of information depends on
appreciating its (subjective) relevance to the question at stake, and that such
appreciation, in turn, depends on the relation between task demands and
processing resources. Jointly, these notions are capable of casting a new light
on the problem of base rate neglect and on conditions under which statistical
versus ‘‘heuristic’’ information may impact individuals’ judgments.
In the original demonstrations of base rate neglect (Kahneman & Tversky,
1973), the base rate information was typically presented briefly, via a single
sentence, and up front. By contrast, the individuating (representativeness)
information was presented subsequently via a relatively lengthy vignette.
If one assumes that participants in such studies had suYcient motivation
and cognitive capacity to wade through the entire informational package with
which they were presented, they might have managed to fully process the
later, lengthier, and hence more demanding vignette information, to have
paid it ample attention, and consequently to have given it considerable weight
in the ultimate judgment. This is analogous to the finding in persuasion
studies that the lengthier, later appearing, message argument information
but not the brief, up front appearing, ‘‘cue’’ information typically had impact
under ample processing resources (e.g., of high‐processing motivation and
cognitive capacity). If the above is true, we should be able to ‘‘move’’ base rate
neglect around by reversing the relative length and ordinal position of the
base rate and the individuating (representativeness) information. A series of
studies by Chun and Kruglanski (2006) attempted just that.
In one condition of their first study, the typical lawyer–engineer paradigm
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1973) was replicated via a presentation of brief and
up‐front base rate information followed by lengthier individuating information.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 289
In another condition, these relations were reversed by presenting brief individ-
uating information first, followed by lengthier and more complex base rate
information (in which the overall base rate of lawyers and engineers was decom-
posed into base rates of the various subcategories of lawyers and engineers).
As predicted, the former condition replicated the typical finding of base rate
neglect, whereas the latter condition evinced considerable base rate utilization.
A subsequent study added a manipulation of cognitive load. The former
results were now replicated in the low‐load condition, but were reversed in
the high‐load condition. Regardless of information type, under load the brief
up‐front information was utilized more than the lengthy subsequent informa-
tion, whereas in the absence of load the lengthy and subsequent information
was utilized more.
The next study used two types of individuating information, presented in two
sequences. In one sequence, brief information consistent with the engineer ste-
reotype was followed by lengthy information consistent with the lawyer stereo-
type. In the alternative sequence, brief information consistent with the lawyer
stereotype was followed by lengthy information consistent with the engineer
stereotype. It was found that heightened cognitive load led to reliance on the
brief and up‐front stereotype, whereas the absence of load prompted reliance on
the lengthier and subsequent stereotype. Finally, the last study presented partici-
pants with information about two samples. In one condition, the first sample
consisting of 30% engineers and 70% lawyers (the 30/70 sample) was followed
by a second sample consisting of 70% engineers and 30% lawyers (the 70/30
sample). In a second condition, the first sample consisted of 70% engineers and
30% lawyers whereas the second sample consisted of 30% engineers and 70%
lawyers. In addition, wemanipulated load. It was found that the first sample was
relied more under load, and the second under no load. Hence in the 30/70; 70?30
condition cognitive load decreased the perceived likelihood of the target being
an engineer, whereas in the 70/30; 30/70 condition cognitive load increased the
perceived likelihood of the target being an engineer, whereas in the 70/30 sample
such likelihood was higher under load (versus no load).
To summarize then, evidence across domains (i.e., of persuasion, attribution,
and judgment under uncertainty) supportsDerivation 2 that the higher the task
demands, the greater should be the processing resources if the information
given is to exert judgmental impact commensurate with its potential relevance.
C. RELATIVE INFORMATIONAL IMPACT
In much judgmental research, participants are presented with several (typi-
cally two) types of information and the question posed is which of the two has
the greater judgmental impact and under what conditions. For instance,
290 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
persuasion researchers wondered when do peripheral or heuristic cues have
greater impact than message arguments and when does the opposite hold true
(Chaiken et al., 1989; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Workers in the domain of
biases and heuris tics (Borgi da & Br ekke, 1981; Ginos sar & Trope, 1980;
Hilton& Slugosky, 2001; Kahneman, 2003; Trope &Ginossar, 1988; Tversky
& Kahneman, 1974) inquired when statistical information (e.g., base rates) is
neglected in favor of simplistic rules of thumb (or heuristics) and when it is
taken into account. Workers in the area of impression formation (Brewer,
1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999) asked when
individuating information about the target is taken into account, and when
is it neglected in favor of social category information, and so on.
Often, the diVerent types of information presented to participants have (inad-
vertently) diVered in their subjective relevance to these persons. For instance, in
the domain of persuasion Pierro et al. (2004) carried out an extensive content
analysis of experimental materials in persuasion studies and concluded that,
typically, the cues presented to participants were judged as less relevant to the
judgmental (attitudinal) topic than were the message arguments. Note that in
much persuasion research the cues but not the message arguments exerted
judgmental impact under low‐processing resources, whereas the message argu-
ments did so under high‐processing resources. From the present perspective, it is
possible to interpret these findings in terms of the following general derivations:
5A
Derivation 4(a) (from postulates 1 and 2): Given suYcient processing potential, the
more relevant information will have a greater impact on judgments than the less
relevant information.
Derivation 4(b) (from postulates 1 and 2). In the absence of suYcient processing
potential, the easier to process information (assuming an above threshold relevance)
will have a greater judgmental impact than the more diYcult to process information.
Pierro et al. (2004) tested these notions in a series of three experimental studies.
They all employed the same 2 � 2 � 2 � 2 factorial design with the variables:
(1) processing motivation‐manipulated via accountability instructions (high ver-
sus low) (Tetlock, 1985), (2) valence of the early informational set about product
features (positive or negative with respect to the attitude object), (3) valence of
the later informational set about product features (positive or negative with
respect to the attitude object), and (4) relative attitudinal relevance5 of the two
informational sets (the early set less relevant than the later set or vice versa).
Also common to all three studies was content of the target judgments, having to
do with relative desirability of a given brand of a cellular phone compared to its
competitors. The studies diVered, however, in contents of the information given
scertained via appropriate pilot studies.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 291
on which basis participants were to reach their judgments. In the first study,
both the early and the later information consisted of message arguments
(about properties of the target phone), in the second study both consisted of
heuristic information (namely, pertinent to the ‘‘consensus heuristic,’’ and con-
taining information about opinion polls as to the target phone’s attributes),
and in the third study, contrary to the typical sequence in persuasion studies‐the early information consisted of message arguments and the later information
of heuristic cues (again regarding consensus).
All three experiments yielded the same general result: When the later and
hence the more diYcult to process information was more subjectively relevant
to the judgmental topic than the early information it exerted judgmental
(persuasive) impact only under high motivation but not under low motivation.
By contrast, the early, less relevant information exerted its eVect only under lowmotivation but not under high motivation. A very diVerent pattern obtained
where the early information was more subjectively relevant than the latter
information. Here, the impact of the early information invariably overrode
that of the later information: Under low‐processing motivation, this may have
been so because the earlier information was easier to process than the later
information, and under high‐processing motivation because the early informa-
tion was in fact more relevant than the later information (see Figs. 9–12 for
illustrative results of our first study).
V. Recapitulation and Conclusions
Judgmental activity insinuates itself into nearly all manner of people’s
response to their social and physical environments, forging an indispensable
launching pad for intelligent action. Indeed, psychological research on di-
verse levels of analysis, from psychophysics to the psychology of culture, has
placed considerable emphasis on the study of judgments and their underly-
ing processes. Over the last several decades, this work has resulted in an
impressive yield of empirical findings, and a large number of conceptual
models, typically adopting a ‘‘dual‐mode’’ perspective. Though some of
these models incorporated various notions of continua (Fiske & Neuberg,
1990; Kahneman, 2003; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986),6 they were predominantly
6Often these continua were anchored in qualitatively diVerent informational contents sup-
porting the concept of a qualitative dichotomy. Thus, Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) ‘‘elaboration
likelihood’’ continuum extends from the brief processing of ‘‘peripheral’’ information to the
thorough processing of ‘‘message and issue information.’’ Fiske and Neuberg’s (1990) continu-
um extends from the brief processing of ‘‘social category’’ information to the extensive (moti-
vated and resource intensive) processing of ‘‘individuating’’ information, and so on.
−0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
−1.0
2.5A
ttitu
des
Low HighAccuracy motivation
Positive information Negative information
Fig. 9. Later/more relevant information is more persuasive under high motivation than
under low motivation (Pierro et al., 2004, Study 1).
292 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
committed to a qualitative dichotomy of judgmental process, rightfully
earning their ‘‘dual‐mode’’ designation.
Of interest, the binary notions of the various dual‐mode frameworks were
quite disparate and did not readily map onto one another. For instance,
the ‘‘peripheral’’ processing mode (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) was depicted in
diVerent terms than the ‘‘heuristic’’ mode (Chaiken et al., 1989) in turn char-
acterized quite distinctly than the ‘‘associative’’ mode (Smith & DeCoster,
2000), the ‘‘impulsive’’ mode (Strack & Deutsch, 2004), or the ‘‘categorical’’
mode (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Similarly, ‘‘central’’ processing
(Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) was portrayed diVerently than ‘‘systematic’’ proces-
sing (Chaiken et al., 1989), ‘‘reflective’’ processing (Strack&Deutsch, 2004), or
‘‘rational’’ processing (Kahneman, 2003), and so on.
In contrast to such conceptual diversity, the present analysis highlights the
common threads shared by the various dual‐mode formulations. These were
conceptualized as the psychological dimensions, or continuous parameters,
on which judgmental situations may be ordered. The key proposed parameter
−0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
−1.0
2.0
Atti
tude
s
Low High
Accuracy motivation
Positive information Negative information
Fig. 11. Early/more relevant information has greater persuasive impact than later/less
relevant information under either low or high motivation (Pierro et al., 2004, Study 1).
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
1.4
1.6
−0.2
1.8
Atti
tude
s
Low HighAccuracy motivation
Positive information Negative information
Fig. 10. Early/less relevant information is more persuasive under low motivation than under
high motivation (Pierro et al., 2004, Study 1).
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 293
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
1.4
1.6
Atti
tude
s
Low HighAccuracy motivation
Positive information Negative information
Fig. 12. Later/less relevant information has less persuasive impact than early/more relevant
information under either low or high motivation (Pierro et al., 2004, Study 1).
294 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
was that of information’s subjective relevance to a judgment. It rests on the
assumption that judgments constitute inferences from evidential input, based
on implicational rules conditionally linking the two in the knower’s mind.
The remaining parameters, namely task demands, and individuals’ cognitive
and motivational resources, represent auxiliary factors aVecting the knowers’
ability to appreciate the potential relevance of the information given to a
requisite judgment. In brief, we have hypothesized that subjective relevance
determines the information’s judgmental impact granting that individuals’
(cognitive and motivational) resources were suYcient for coping with the
task demands, hence accurately gleaning the potential relevance of the
information given.
Evidence fromheterogeneous judgmental domains (persuasion, attributions,
judgments under uncertainty, or impression formation) yielded support for
these assertions. Among others, it was found that where information extrane-
ous to the message or the issue (e.g., about the communicator’s expertise) is
presented lengthily and complexly, posing considerable processing demands,
it exerts judgmental (persuasive) impact only under high degree of processing
motivation and/or high degree of cognitive capacity. However, where the same
information is presented briefly and simply it exerts impact under low motiva-
tion and/or capacity. Similarly, whenmessage or issue information is presented
lengthily and complexly, it exerts judgmental (persuasive) impact under high‐processing motivation and cognitive capacity. However, where the message or
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 295
issue information is presented briefly and simply, it exerts judgmental (persua-
sive) impact under lowmotivation and/or capacity (Erb et al., 2003;Kruglanski
& Thompson, 1999a; Pierro et al., 2005).7 We also found that the ability of
traits to aVect impressions (the trait centrality eVect; Asch, 1946) depends on
their subjective relevance to the specific impressions, in turn, contingent on
individuals’ lay theories that tie the traits to the impressions (Fishbach et al.,
2005).
In a similar vein, prior research (Borgida & Brekke, 1980; Hilton, 1995) has
demonstrated the role of subjective relevance in mediating the impact of statis-
tical information (such as base rates) on likelihood estimates, and the possibility
of teaching individuals various inferential rules, hence augmenting the subjec-
tive relevance of statistical information to specific estimates (Nisbett et al., 1987;
Sedlmeier, 1999). Furthermore, Chun and Kruglanski (2006) have shown that
the task demands posed by statistical or stereotypic information may vary, and
that in both cases demands interact in an identical manner with individuals’
processing potential to determine the impact of (either type of ) information on
specific judgments. Finally, research has shown that where the individuals’
processing potential suYces to cope with the task demands, the more relevant
information overrides in its judgmental impact the less relevant information;
by contrast, where the processing potential is insuYcient to cope with the
task demands, the easier to process information (even if of lower relevance)
overrides the more diYcult to process information (Pierro et al., 2004).
The judgmental parameters identified in the present model aVord the inte-
gration of the various concepts and findings featured in prior judgmental
models. Consider for example ‘‘intuitions’’ defined by Kahneman (2003) as
highly accessible heuristics that come easily to mind. In present terms, such
‘‘intuitions’’ represent easy to process rules imposing low degree of cognitive
demands on the individual. It is precisely for that reason that ‘‘intuitions’’ have
been known to dominate judgments under conditions of limited cognitive
resources (Kahneman, 2003). Similarly, in persuasion research ‘‘peripheral’’
or ‘‘heuristic’’ cues (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) have been typically operationa-
lized in a manner that may have rendered their processing appreciably less
demanding than the processing of message or issue information; indeed, that
could be the reason why the former type of information exerted greater impact
under limited processing resources, and the latter type of information under
7Note that our experimental studies pit predictions derived from the present theoretical formu-
lation against those derived from the dual mode persuasion models, aVording them an equal
opportunity to be validated. For instance, if message information turned out to be more impactful
under high processing resources, and the peripheral information under low processing resources
irrespective of their relative length or complexity, this would have validated the dualmode prediction
regarding the importance of the type/content of information (i.e., claiming that message informa-
tion is processed in a qualitatively diVerent manner than peripheral cue information).
296 ARIE W. KRUGLANSKI et al.
ample informational resources (Erb et al., 2003; Kruglanski & Thompson,
1999a,b; Kruglanski et al., 1999; Pierro et al., 2005). Finally, notions of ‘‘asso-
ciative,’’ ‘‘impulsive,’’ or ‘‘automatic’’ processing are readily interpretable in
terms of highly routinized rules (Anderson, 1983; Bargh, 1996; Schneider &
ShiVrin, 1977) operating swiftly, eYciently, and often outside awareness, hence
imposing low‐processing demands and capable of judgmental impact under
conditions of low‐processing potential.The parametric approach of the unimodel aVords two types of integration
as far as the dualistic frameworks are concerned: a within‐models integration
and a between‐models integration. Rather than treating the two modes within
each model as qualitatively distinct, the within‐models integration orders
them on one or more dimensional continua. For instance, in much persuasion
research ‘‘peripheral cues’’ and ‘‘message or issue arguments’’ have varied
both on the parameter of task demands (the cues being easier to process than
the arguments) and on the parameter of subjective relevance (the cues being
typically perceived as less relevant than the arguments) (Kruglanski &
Thompson, 1999a,b; Pierro et al., 2004, 2005). Similarly, ‘‘intuitive’’ heuris-
tics have been defined as more accessible, hence lower on the parameter of
task demands than ‘‘rational’’ thoughts (Kahneman, 2003), and the proces-
sing of ‘‘social categories’’ was assumed to require less motivation, hence also
to be less demanding than the processing of ‘‘individuating information’’
(Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990).
‘‘Automatic’’ or ‘‘impulsive’’ processing was defined as more eYcient,
hence posing lesser demands on the information processing system, than
‘‘reflective’’ processing (Strack & Deutsch, 2004), and so on. The present
analysis suggests that it is such parametric diVerences between the modes
(degree of task demands or of subjective relevance of information) rather than
other possible distinctions (e.g., in the type or contents of the information
processed, awareness, or swiftness of processing) that account for the empiri-
cal results on which numerous dual‐mode formulations were based. The
evidence reviewed above (see also Chun & Kruglanski, 2006; Chun et al.,
2002; Erb et al., 2003; Kruglanski & Thompson, 1999a,b; Pierro et al., 2004,
2005) is consistent with such an analysis.
Because the proposed judgmental parameters constitute dimensions com-
mon to all judgmental contexts, the present model also aVords an integration
between the various dual process models. In other words, the conceptual diver-
sity of the dual‐mode formulations was based on qualitative model‐specificconstructs (e.g., ‘‘peripheral cues,’’ ‘‘heuristics,’’ ‘‘automaticity,’’ ‘‘reflection’’).
If, as presently suggested, such diversity is eVectively reducible to several con-
tinuousparameters, and if suchparameters are common to judgmentaldomains
explored by the dual‐mode models, the present formulation oVers a unified
perspective on human judgment, aVording a synthesis of a rather fragmented
field of psychological inquiry.
ON THE PARAMETERS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 297
Perhaps more important than the integrative potential of our unified
formulation is its focus on the several critical determinants of judgments
and their continuous nature. These are conceptualized as orthogonal param-
eters defining a multidimensional space wherein the plethora of judgmental
situations constitute separate points. Such a conception captures the consid-
erable flexibility and malleability of the human judgmental capabilities.
Thus, dynamic processes of rule‐learning determine the degree of relevance
a given bit of information holds for a given individual. Vicissitudes of
situational saliency and rule‐accessibility determine the diYculty of utilizing
a given bit of information in a given context. Perceived degree of task
importance, of cognitive busyness and the individual’s energy level, deter-
mine the degree to which she or he will tend to recruit the needed resources
to address a given judgmental problem. Thus, the present framework views
the judgmental process in terms of infinitely fine gradations on several
intersecting dimensions, whose shifts smoothly transform into one another
what initially may appear as qualitatively distinct phenomena.
Finally but not of least importance, the central issue dealt with by the
present model is of a considerable real‐world relevance. Essentially, it con-
cerns the conditions under which the information given impacts individuals’
judgments, and those in which it does not. This question touches on a variety
of intriguing phenomena such as recipients’ reluctance to be convinced by
seemingly incontrovertible arguments, or, to be quickly persuaded by obvi-
ously specious ones, conflicted parties’ intransigence and inability to reach
agreements despite the adversary’s generous concessions, the considerable
challenges of intercultural communication, or the abysmal failures ‘‘to see it
coming’’ despite the availability of ample, seemingly obvious, information,
prompting costly debacles and tragedies of technical or military nature (see
Bar‐Joseph & Kruglanski, 2003). A generalized understanding how judg-
ments are formed may oVer insights into these and other topics related to the
many complex issues facing individuals and groups in today’s world.
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to Judson Mills and Wendy Wood for comments on a previous draft. This
work was supported by NSF Grant SBR‐9417422.
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