Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

282 Understanding Intuitive Decision Making

about the two candidates. Instead, they fi rst conducted an attribute-based search and compared

the two candidates on the basis of a few traits or attributes. Then they used a noncompensatory

choice rule called the majority-of-confi rming-dimensions rule and chose the candidate with the highest

number of favorable comparisons. Only if this comparison resulted in a tie did voters decide on the

basis of political party stereotypes. Interestingly, this model of voter decision making appears to be

highly predictive of voter choice.^284

When the audience’s task is to evaluate a single individual, as opposed to decide among different

individuals, the two rules audiences most frequently use are the weighted and unweighted aver-

aging rules.^285 Both rules are compensatory and rely on alternative-based search. And both have

much in common with the normative weighted additive choice rule.

In his seminal study of information integration, social psychologist Norman Anderson asked

participants to read paragraphs about several U.S. presidents and then to rate each president’s states-

manship and accomplishments on a scale that that ranged from 0 to 10. For each president readers

received two paragraphs that were either positive, neutral, or negative toward that president. Read-

ers who read two positive paragraphs about a president formed a very positive impression of him.

Readers who received both a neutral and a positive paragraph formed a moderately positive impres-

sion. And readers who received two negative paragraphs formed an extremely negative impression.

Professor Anderson found that all readers, even those who were exposed to confl icting messages

about a president, formed an impression that corresponded to the unweighted average value of the

two messages.^286

Audiences use the weighted and unweighted averaging rules to evaluate others in a wide range

of situations. In a study of personnel selection, personnel managers read verbal descriptions of job

applicants’ personality traits. Each trait was described in terms of one of four scale values (low, below

average, above average, and high). The results showed that the personnel managers used the weighted

averaging rule to judge each of the applicants.^287 In a study of health care decisions, parents read

verbal descriptions of pediatricians and were asked to evaluate them. Each pediatrician was described

in terms of the doctor’s ability to handle children and the quality of her staff ’s manners. Each of these

attributes varied across four scale values (low, below average, above average, and high). In this case, the

parents evaluated each pediatrician using the unweighted averaging rule.^288

Audiences also use averaging rules to integrate visual information about other people with

verbal information about them. In a study of visual/verbal information integration, female college

students looked at photographs of male college students, read descriptions of the male students’

personal characteristics, and then evaluated the male students’ dating desirability. The study showed

that the female students used the weighted averaging rule to integrate the male students’ physi-

cal attractiveness with the verbal descriptions of their personal characteristics.^289 A study of juror

decision making comes to a similar conclusion: Jurors decide the guilt or innocence of defendants

by combining relevant verbal information with the defendants’ nonverbal behaviors using the

weighted averaging rule.^290

What types of information do audiences tend to weight more heavily when integrating infor-

mation about the people they perceive? Research shows that audiences tend to give more weight

to information that is inconsistent with the other information they have about the individual.^291

It also shows that they weight negative information more heavily than positive information.^292

Recruiters weight negative information about job applicants more heavily^293 because they believe

that negative behaviors, as well as extreme ones, are particularly diagnostic of job applicants’ per-

sonality traits.^294

When making some types of decisions, audience members must also be able to integrate quantitative

information with their subjective impressions of others. For example, when loan offi cers make lending