EFFECT OF INFORMATION REDUNDANCY ON CONTEXT EFFECTS IN PERSONALITY IMPRESSION FORMATION
SUSUMU Y. TAKAHASHI · Japanese Psychological Research · 1975
The purpose of this study was to test directly the change in meaning hypothesis of the context effect. Ss were given 3 personality-trait adjectives description of a stimulus person, and they rated their liking for the person, their liking for a test adjective and its connotative meaning. The degree of semantic redundancy among 3 adjectives was manipulated by varying their semantic similarity. The results indicated that the both ratings of the test adjective's likability and its connotative meaning directly varied as a function of the context desirability. While the changes in meaning were unexpectedly greater in highly redundant adjectives than in the less redundants, the magnitude of the context effect was significantly greater in the less redundant adjectives than in the highly redundants. Moreover, the impressions based upon the less redundant descriptions were more polarized than the impressions based upon the highly redundants. While these findings strongly support the change in meaning hypothesis, the results were discussed in the light of the differential weighted averaging formulation.