Averaging versus adding as a stimulus-combination rule in impression formation.

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Abstract
Ss rated their liking of persons described by sets of 2 or 4 personality-trait adjectives. Adjectives were chosen from 4 scale ranges: extremely or moderately favorable or unfavorable. Results were as follows. (a) A set of 2 moderate and 2 extreme adjectives produced a less extreme response than the set of 2 extreme adjectives alone. This result is inconsistent with the idea that S reaches his impression by adding the stimulus values; it is qualitatively consistent with the idea that he averages the stimulus values. (b) With all adjectives of equal value, an increase in the number of adjectives per set produced a more extreme response. It was shown how this set-size effect, which seems to be inconsistent with an averaging model, can be handled by such a formulation. (c) The additive and averaging models made the same predictions for 2 quantitative comparisons of which 1 showed significant discrepancy. There is thus some question whether either formulation can handle the data at a quantitative level. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

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