Abstract
The study evaluated the effects of amount and relevance of target information on judgments of personality characteristics and on judgmental certainty. Mode of presentation of target information and whether the target person was described as real or hypothetical were also systematically varied. Main effects due to the relevance and amount of target information were significant for both trait attribution scores and judgmental certainty. All other main effects and interactions were not significant. The results indicated that in addition to informational relevance, increasing amounts of information, regardless of degree of relevance, contributed to judgmental certainty and increased trait attributions beyond the point of optimal inferential “accuracy” for remotely but positively related characteristics. Lack of significant effects due to target reality are interpreted as lending greater confidence to the generalizability of results from laboratory studies of social perception.
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Burron, B.F., Carlson, K.A., Ronald Getty, G. et al. The effects of informational characteristics on the perception of real and hypothetical target persons. Psychon Sci 23, 145–147 (1971). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03336049
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03336049