The Effects of Assimilation and Contrast in Judgments of Clinical Materials

Abstract

The promise of a generalized psychology of judgment seems most evident in the effects of stimulus-context upon the response to a specific stimulus. Here such phenomena as anchoring and adaptation-level seem to hold both for a wide variety of simple physical stimuli and for more complex stimuli whose intensity varies in terms of learned connotations independent of any physical dimension.1 The clinical materials used in the present study are an example of such complex stimuli. We used schizophrenic responses from a vocabulary test, and the judges were asked to scale them for the severity of disturbance exhibited. That context should influence the judgment of such materials seems eminently reasonable. Thus the second author, in unquantified observations of the judgments of Naval psychiatrists performing in a screening unit during World War II, noted that psychiatrists with a background of private practice tended to consider examinees to be more disturbed psychiatrically than did psychiatrists with a background of state hospital experience, a finding which conforms to adaptation-level theory. Yet a previous study by Arnhoff using clinical judgments of schizophrenic testresponses failed to demonstrate predicted anchoring effects.2 This outcome is so out of keeping with the general evidence in the area of judgment that it seemed desirable to reexamine the problem, using a design employing a drastic change in stimulus-context rather than relying upon anchoring. Our hypothesis was that stimuli of median value would be judged as less severe when presented in context with stimuli selected from the severe end of the continuum, and as more severe when presented in context with stimuli from the mild end of the continuum.