Changes in meaning and halo effects in personality impression formation

Explored the reason why evaluations of a personality adjective increase with the favorableness of the adjectives accompanying it. In Exp I, involving 137 undergraduates, context effects increased with the ambiguity of the (test) adjective being rated, as inferred from an information measure of uncertainty about the evaluative implications of the adjective. Exp II, with 48 Ss, showed that the average of the evaluative implications of the meanings assigned to test adjectives in different contexts was highly correlated with the actual evaluations of the adjectives in these contexts. Changes in the meanings assigned to test adjectives in different contexts appeared to account for context effects when the adjectives in each collective described a single person but underestimated the magnitude of these effects when each adjective described a different member of a group of persons. While results of the experiments are more consistent with a change-of-meaning interpretation of context effects than with the generalized halo effect interpretation proposed by N. H. Anderson (See PA, Vol 46:2989, 4805), they suggested that both changes in meaning and halo effects may contribute to these effects to different degrees, depending on the type of judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1974 American Psychological Association