When Judging For Others Is Affected By Fluency? -The Moderation Of Social Role Similarity

Feeling is everywhere in our daily life, including mood that doesn’t have a clear direction and may last for a long time, emotion which has a clear direction and limited duration, metacognitive feeling of ease-of-retrieval effect, and bodily sensation. To explain kinds of phenomenon that feeling affect the judgement and evaluation in daily life, the feeling-as-information theory has been developed since about a quarter century ago, which is used to form an different decision making system from the traditional decision making system relying on contents, and can be used to explain the direct impact of feelings on judgement and evaluation. Studies have pointed out that:(1) a given feeling itself provides a source of information, and different feelings provide different information, (2) what we can conclude from a given feeling depends on the perceived informative value for the task at hand, (3) representativeness and relevance, as the two important determinants of perceived informative value of feelings, has been widely discussed in academics, (4) when feelings are used as a source of information, similar to the use of other information, they follow the same rules of using any other source of information in judgement, (5) what’s more, similar to the other information, what is the meaning of a given feeling depends on how the question is put.One of what social psychologists are particularly interested in is processing fluency, which means how easy of processing information. Fluency has impact on people’s judgment and evaluation, which has been also widely discussed in academics. But in the past literature there is little discussion about situations in which we judge for others, compared to a large body of researches about the situations we judge for ourselves. Another question is that whether there are other moderations of relying on feeling in judgement in addition to representativeness and relevance, or whether there are other determinants of relevance in addition to hedonic/instrument motivation. Trying to answer the two questions, this paper focuses on the situation in which how social role similarity affect the impact of fluency on judgement when judging for others. Then three different studies are conducted, the result of which support the assumption that role similarity moderates people’s relying on fluency in judgement when judging for others. The result shows that we relying on processing fluency more in the judgement when judging a product for the ones similar to ourselves, whereas we relying on processing fluency less in judging a product when judging for the ones dissimilar to ourselves.