Status and the judgment of occupational prestige.

Abstract

HEN people are asked to rate a series of stimuli on an arbitrary category scale, their judgments are made in relation to one or more reference points or anchors. The rating assigned to a stimulus depends upon the direction and magnitude of the distance between the stimulus and the anchor (Volkmann, 1951). A shift in the location of the anchor toward the high end of the rating dimension leads to a displacement of the stimulus judgments toward the low end. A displacement of stimulus judgments in an upward direction is found when the anchor is shifted toward the low end of the judgment dimension.2 These judgmental phenomena have been observed with both physical and verbal stimuli (Guilford, 19S4; McGarvey, 1943). There are a variety of ways in which the locations of anchors are determined. Sometimes subjects spontaneously choose the most extreme stimuli in a series as anchors because they are most easily discriminated from the other stimuli. At other times the experimenter provides special stimuli that subjects are instructed to use as anchors. In both of these cases the anchor is an external stimulus that is continuously or intermittently present in the judgment situation. There have, however, been studies which suggest that people may also use internal anchors to guide their judgments. Hunt (1941) found that asking subjects to imagine the most extreme stimulus they could think of, on a given dimension, had the same effect as employing an external anchor. Tresselt (1948) compared the weight judgments of weight lifters, watchmakers, and students. She found that the weight lifters initially judged the experimental weights as lighter than did either of the other groups. Presumably this difference was due to heavier internal anchors on the part of the weight lifters than on that of the watchmakers or students.