ABSTRACT
That social judgment is context dependent is no news. From philosophical treatments of human reasoning (see Tatarkiewicz, 1984) and early research on attitude measurement (see Eiser, 1990, for a review) to current public opinion research (see Schwarz & Sudman, 1992) and theorizing in social cognition (cf. the contributions to this volume), students of social judgment have been fascinated by the context dependency of human thought. As numerous experimental studies and natural observations indicate, the evaluation of a target stimulus may be either assimilated or contrasted to the context in which it is presented. In this chapter, we use these terms in their most general form, speaking of an assimilation effect whenever the judgment reflects a positive (direct) relationship between the implications of some piece of information and the judgment, and of a contrast effect whenever the judgment reflects a negative (inverse) relationship of the judgment and the implications of some piece of information.
