IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/xrs/sfbmaa/99-08.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Assimilation and Contrast as a Function of the direction of Comparison

Author

Listed:
  • Wänke, Michaela

    (Sonderforschungsbereich 504)

Abstract

Two studies show that an extreme context stimulus may elicit assimilation rather than contrast in the evaluation of an ambivalent target stimulus by increasing the salience of the features the target shares with the context stimulus. Holding the descriptions of target and context constant, feature overlap in the representationbuilt of the target was manipulated by the direction of comparison (study 1) and additional instructions (study 2).Depending on the direction of comparison with which target and context were previously compared either asssimilation or contrast to the context valence occured in a later evaluation of the target. The results suggest that activating shared features may suffice to induce inter-exemplar assimilation even without assigning target and context to the same category. This bottom-up process of inter-exemplar assimilation complements the top-down conteceptualization of a category-derived judgement.

Suggested Citation

  • Wänke, Michaela, 1999. "Assimilation and Contrast as a Function of the direction of Comparison," Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications 99-08, Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim;Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim.
    • Handle: RePEc:xrs:sfbmaa:99-08
    Note: The reported research was supported by grant from the Sonderforschungsbereich 504,L 13,15 D-68131 Mannheim and by grant B1 28975 from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to H. Bless, N.Schwarz and M. Wänke. Comments on an earlier draft by Herbert Bless, Gerd Bohner Klaus Fiedler, Guido Hertl, Jeanette Schmid, Norbert Schwarz and Jim Sherman are gratefully acknowledged. Address correspondence to Michaela Wänke, Psychologisches Institut, Universität Heidelberg, Hauptstr. 47-51, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany; Phone: GErmany-6221-547361; fax: Germany-6221-547745; e-mail ziv7@psi-sv1.psi.uni-heidelberg.de
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:xrs:sfbmaa:99-08. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Carsten Schmidt (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfmande.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.