Judgement of Attitude Statements as a Function of Judges' Attitudes and the Judgemental Dimension

Abstract

Judges were required to rate 30 statements concerning drug use on each of five Thurstone-type scales. On two of these scales the ‘pro-drug’ extreme was labelled by a term with relatively negative value connotations, and on the other three scales by a term with relatively positive value connotations. The results supported the hypothesis that judges would tend to show a relatively high degree of polarization in their ratings along scales where their own position lay closer to the positively valued end of the scale, and a relatively low degree of polarization along scales where their own position lay closer to the negative end. These differences were independent of a tendency for some judges, irrespective of their own attitude, to give more extreme ratings than other judges on all five scales.