Salience Of Attributes Research Articles

Attitude change among U.S. adults after the Castro-Obama announcement: the role of soft power in agenda setting

The United States and Cuba made history in late 2014 by announcing the resumption of diplomatic relations. With the media coverage and social media content related to the announcements as a stimulus, this pre-post-study noted increases in U.S. adults’ levels of perceived knowledge, salience of attributes, as well as attitudes toward Cuba after the joint proclamations. Results suggest that media coverage and social media content played major roles in influencing both public knowledge of and attitudes toward Cuba as a country. These first- and second-level agenda-setting effects are positioned within the Model of Country Concept as an example of soft power. The power of international media to affect both cognitive and affective evaluations among the citizens of one country about the government and citizenry of another is discussed. This article is published as part of a collection on soft power.

Causes of Fiscal Illusion: Lack of Information or Lack of Attention?

According to fiscal illusion theory, voters misperceive fiscal parameters because of incomplete information. The costs of public services are underestimated, implying that if voters had full information, their support for public services would drop. The literature has focused on testing the implications of fiscal illusions, whereas the question why fiscal illusions occur at all has received less attention. According to the standard argument, individuals base their opinion of policy proposals on a valuation of benefits and costs. We formalize the standard argument and show that it is a special case of the attention model of fiscal illusion. In this model, opinion depends on the saliency of attributes of the proposal. We show that the attention model can better explain fiscal illusion by deriving competing hypotheses, which are tested in a survey experiment. We conclude that the mechanism behind fiscal illusion is attention and framing, not incomplete information.

The Effect of Gender Differences on the Choice of Banking Services

This paper presents a conceptual framework based on the evolutionary theory to explain gender differences when considering the saliency of various attributes in choosing a banking service. Unlike most studies that examined the importance of these attributes by asking respondents to rate them, we assessed the saliency of the attributes indirectly in a choice task among five real banks, hence examined the gender differences in a realistic choices process. Results from both studies supported hypotheses based on evolutionary theory in that functional considerations such as cost were more important for men than for women, while other service characteristics were salient for both genders. Implications for marketing strategies that target men and women differently are discussed.

Anomalies de la théorie des préférences

Résumé Les anomalies expérimentales concernant la théorie des préférences sont souvent interprétées comme devant conduire à renoncer au concept de préférence. Or, nous montrons que la validité de cette inférence suppose vérifiée une hypothèse implicite – le principe d’invariance ( pi ) – selon laquelle certains aspects des objets de choix ne sont pas pertinents. Elle est habituellement confondue avec une hypothèse indispensable à la pratique de la modélisation en économie, l’hypothèse de fidélité ( hf ), qui stipule que le langage utilisé dans le modèle est suffisamment riche pour exprimer la diversité des observations empiriques. Nous montrons qu’il est nécessaire de désimbriquer ( hf ) et ( pi ), ce qui est possible grâce à l’introduction de la structure de problème de décision avec équivalence normative ( pden ). Nous étudions le processus de décision qui lui est inhérent, d’après lequel la saillance d’un attribut est cruciale pour la prise de décision.

Compelling Arguments and Attitude Strength

This study explores the relationship between attribute agenda setting and public opinion of political candidates. Specifically, media salience of presidential candidate attributes across five national elections is compared to public opinion data measuring perceived candidate salience and the strength of public attitudes regarding candidates. Findings suggest that media salience of attributes is strongly linked with strengthened attitudes and is moderately linked with perceived candidate salience. The implications of the findings are also discussed.

Event category learning.

This research investigated the learning of event categories, in particular, categories of simple animated events, each involving a causal interaction between 2 characters. Four experiments examined whether correlations among attributes of events are easier to learn when they form part of a rich correlational structure than when they are independent of other correlations. Event attributes (e.g., state change, path of motion) were chosen to reflect distinctions made by verbs. Participants were presented with an unsupervised learning task and were then tested on whether the organization of correlations affected learning. Correlations forming part of a system of correlations were found to be better learned than isolated correlations. This finding of facilitation from correlational structure is explained in terms of a model that generates internal feedback to adjust the salience of attributes. These experiments also provide evidence regarding the role of object information in events, suggesting that this role is mediated by object category representations.

Critical Characteristics of Fabric Quality

This article investigates the importance of fabric quality to home sewers and the salience of attributes (critical characteristics) used in evaluating fabric quality. The sample consisted of 80 home sewers, 20 subjects from each of four fabric stores, who responded to an instrument designed to determine desired purchase information and attributes used to signify fabric quality. Prior to buying fabric for a casual dress, 96% of subjects considered fabric quality important. Physical cues, such as fiber content labels, color/print/design, and fabric hand, were more important than performance cues, such as ease of care and durability. Intrinsic cues were used more often than extrinsic cues as critical characteristics of fabric quality.

Influence of Unrewarded Stimuli on the Classification of Visual Patterns by Honey Bees

AbstractBees were trained to discriminate visual patterns in five experiments. The rewarded pattern (S+), was a 50‐mm black disc in all experiments; the unrewarded pattern (S–) was varied. Subsequently bees were given a choice between different stimuli in order to discover what bees learnt about five attributes of the training stimuli. The attributes tested were size, contrast, color, ‘compactness’ vs. ‘dissectedness’ (tests with ring‐patterns), and presence or absence of acute points (tests with discs, squares, triangles and stars). The significance of these attributes varied with the particular unrewarded pattern (S–) used in training (Figs. 1, 2). This is interpreted as a modification of the bee's selective attention to certain features during training. The results also indicate a difference in the salience of attributes. Differences in size or outline (presence of acute points) only influenced the bee's preference after a training that specifically required this distinction, while differences in contrast, colour and dissectedness were also significant when the training stimuli did not differ in that respect.

Salience in Logical Deduction Tasks: Effects on Processing or Representation?

Abstract An experiment was conducted to determine the role of a salient characteristic in a logical deduction task on the representational and/or processing capabilities of subjects. Subjects worked on a logical problem that was systematically altered by changing the information involved in making a particular deduction. Subjects were more likely to make the deduction under conditions of high salience, even though the logical, or processing demands of the deduction were similar in the high and low salient conditions. This finding suggests that the salience of attributes in logical deduction tasks influences the subjects' representation of them, rather than their processing of such attributes.

Salience of Attributes and Commitment to Extreme Judgments in the Perception of People

The investigation is concerned with the relation between the subjective importance of a personal attribute and the manner of judging other people in terms of that attribute. A prediction was made that in a task involving the rating of others in terms of a number of attributes, there will be a tendency to use relatively extreme judgments for attributes which are important to the person making the judgments. This hypothesis, derived from a background of general findings about quantitative judgment, was confirmed. It was tested in a situation in which the subjects were able to give fairly free descriptions of others. Some time after these descriptions were made, each subject rated photographs on rating scales based on his own use of various attributes. The salience of attributes (i.e. their relative priority and frequency of occurrence in free descriptions of others) was assumed to be an index of their importance to the subjects. This assumption was tested and validated in a separate experiment.