Studies On Implicit And Explicit Processes In Social Judgments

Social judgment, one of the three main parts of social cognition which also includes social perception and social impression, didn't obtain its deserved concern in the early research of experimental social psychology until recent years, while social judgment has been predictive to be a mainstream topic since the birth of social psychology.Prof. Wundt, the father of scientific psychology, shifted his interest to the researches of folk psychology at the beginning of his last twenty years. This strongly implied that the investigation of social psychology was initiated by the first generation of psychologists. But it was Munsterberg, one of the second generation of psychologists, that first adopted experimentation to social behavior study. Finally, his graduate student Allport set the foundation of experimental social psychology.After the Crisis during 1960s through 1970s, social cognition, including social judgment, has developed into a notable topic in experimental social psychology. With the development of social cognition research, social judgment has attracted more and more researchers, due to its methodological and ecological superiorities. Social judgment, which combined advances in both social cognition and JDM (judgment and decision making), grows into a focus in recent research of experimental social psychology. For the purpose of further understanding of social judgment, four experiments were designed to analyze the explicit and implicit processing in it.In the preliminary study of Yang and Li (2004), they found that there were significant differences between players and spectators in decision making under uncertainty, and that players preferred the riskier and high-rewarded choice to the more conservative and low-rewarded one, while spectators were risk-aversive. Controlling situational variables in hypothetical situation, experiment 1 replicated the results of previous study. The results are discussed in terms of different heuristics used in decision making, i.e. players preferred the custom heuristic, while spectators preferred the personality heuristic.In Experiment 2, subjects were asked to make an either/or choice about the follow-up experiment after 5 try-outs in stylus maze task, meanwhile expectedoutcomes of players and spectators were balanced completely. Results showed that the difference between players and lured spectators disappeared, i.e. both prefer riskier and high-rewarded choice; as for information processing, players tend to make judgments based on objective information more than lured spectators. Lured spectators experienced much higher choice conflict. The difference mainly results from gains and losses, followed by different mediating responses, custom heuristic or personality heuristic. Gender of players is also found to be a moderator variable in player-spectator difference.In experiment 3, subjects were asked to make player-viewed or spectator-viewed judgments concerning each character's behavior choice after reading the Orphan of Zhao Family, a the story in traditional Peking opera. They should respond to locate a point on the choice differential scale. Another independent variable is cultural background. The story appears as either a Chinese-cultural version or a Western-cultural version, differing each other in person names, countries, dynasties, officials and knowledge. Results showed some significant cultural priming effects and interactions with player-or-spectator role. These empirical findings indicate the cultural accumulation characteristics of implicit processes.In experiment 4, a material which including the crime of passion and bystander intervening was used to investigate the same judgments as previous experiments. Results showed that no semantic priming effect was significant, but player-spectator difference was significant in some aspects, e.g., players tend to be worldly-wise and play safe more than spectators do.On the basis of the above findings, several implicit processes named by implicit risk-taking tendencies, custom heuristic and personality heuristic separatel...