Do We Tell Less Than We Know or Hear Less Than We Are Told? Exploring the Teller-Listener Extremity Effect

Abstract

Gilovich ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 59-74, 1987) argued that people (tellers) transmitting information about a target person′s reprehensible behavior to a second party (listeners) omit information about situational causes for such behavior. Moreover, because these mitigating circumstances are omitted (or masked), listeners make more extreme (positive and negative) judgments of the target person than tellers do. The two present studies show that this teller-listener extremity effect is very robust but is not mediated by the teller′s tendency to omit (mask) either situational information (as Gilovich argued) or stylistic information about the target person′s level of remorse. Rather, the data suggest that most situational information is transmitted, but the listeners do not weigh this information as heavily as tellers when forming impressions about the target person.