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

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Abstract
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.

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