ABSTRACT
The assumptions a judge makes about the implications of received information may be influenced in part by the particular subset of his past experience that he happens to retrieve and use as a basis for interpreting this information. (For a detailed analysis of these possibilities, see Chapters 2 and 4.) These assumptions may also be affected by the context in which the information is presented or, finally, by general characteristics of the information itself. These characteristics have been studied primarily in the area of impression formation, where liking for a person is inferred on the basis of personality adjectives describing him. The extent to which the results of this research generalize to conditions involving other types of information and other types of judgments has not been clearly established. However, certain generalizations seem reasonable. For instance, conceptual similarities exist between certain factors known to affect the contribution of adjective descriptions to liking judgments and factors postulated to affect attributions based upon behavioral information. These similarities will be examined in this chapter.
