Verbal Ambiguity and Judgmental Distortion

Hovland, Harvey, and Sherif (1957) have recently demonstrated that an individual’s attitude serves as an anchor in his judgment of the stand advocated in a communication. They present evidence for a complex curve of judgmental distortion as a function of attitude position; a contrast effect for extreme judges . (Pros rate it more con than Neutrals while Cons rate it more pro), but an assirnilation effect for more moderate judges (who tend to perceive a stand as closer to their own position than do neutral judges) The present study investigates this phenomenon while employing simple stimulus materials (sentences) rather than entire, complex communications. In addition, the ambiguity of the sentences was varied. The ambiguity was related to semantic properties of the stimulus material; either the stimulus presented a multiplicity of cues to which different responses were attached, or the stimulus lacked any semantic cues, S generally supplying (projecting) his own. After having been given a “subjective” scale to assess their own attitudes toward science, Ss were given a series of 24 statements (alleged to be excerpts from the National Science Symposium) which varied in type and degree of ambiguity. Six expert judges in Linguistics and English evaluated the ambiguity of the stimuli. The set of statements, which were to be evaluated one at a time, was composed of: 6 well-structured items (varying in the position represented), 6 items of the double-barrelled type (e.g., “Scientists are men of very high intelligence and little social conscience”), 6 items containing an ambiguous word (e.g., “Scientists are aggressive people”), and 6 items whose meaning was indeterminate (e.g., “Anyone who has known a scientist personally will know why science is where it is today”, or “If you have followed recent developments in science, you will know that there can be one solution to the problem”). Ss’ task was to “be as objective as possible” in judging on an 11-point scale how favorable each individual statement was toward science. It was emphasized that they were not to indicate their personal feelings toward each statement, but were to make an objective judgment of the degree of favorability of the sentence (or in effect, its author) toward science. Ss were: ( a ) 26 Yale undergraduates in introductory psychology, (b) 14 Science majors and 14 majors in the Humanities at Yale, and (c ) 28 unselected, paid Ss recruited from the Yale Employment Bureau. The former two groups received the verbal material in written form, while the latter group was given the stimuli aurally via a tape recording. The aural presentation was introduced in an effort to control the duration of exposure of each sentence for every S. Ss in Group ( a ) were tested as a group, while those in Groups ( b ) and (c) were tested individually. Neither of these variations in mode of stimulus presentation affected the results differentially.