Taking a Measure of Comparative Thinking: Revisiting Assimilation and Contrast

人类驾驭社会环境和对情境启示做出反应的方式本质上是相对的。在判断其他个体时，人们使用比较标准来校准他们的判断，无论这个特定的人是否相对聪明，表现出同化倾向，以调整他们的判断在比较标准的方向上，或者表现出对比倾向，以进一步远离。虽然有突出的模型来解释这种影响的前因（最突出的是，选择性可及性模型），目前的比较研究的一个主要缺点是缺乏一个敏感的措施。人们对比较信息的依赖程度，以及他们在多大程度上表现出同化或对比倾向，目前还没有得到充分验证的衡量标准。如果没有这样一个被广泛接受的措施，整个文献中的不一致之处仍然是含糊不清的，他们是否说的基本理论或仅仅是某些操作的附带损害。具体来说，不一致的结果可能仅仅是因为人们对给定标准的不同看法，或者因为所选择的标准只是不够极端，不足以促进对比，或者不够温和，不足以促进同化。在本项目中，我们建议进一步推进一个新发明的比较判断任务（在第一个项目阶段）的发展成为一个细粒度的比较处理措施。采用一种新的曲线拟合方法将使我们不再需要对什么是极端标准、什么是温和标准提供一致的定义。独立于精确值，并考虑到个体和情境的差异，任何作为比较标准函数的正弦波形式的判断分布将a）证实选择可及性模型的预测，以及B）允许提取比较处理和同化与对比倾向的精确参数。在本项目的第二阶段，我们将进一步验证这一措施在一系列的尺寸（工作包1），仔细检查其心理测量特性（工作包2），并提供其实验验证的插图（工作包3）。在工作包1中难以建立有效性的意外情况下，我们提出了一个替代工作包4，它将仔细研究现有文献，以更好地理解同化和对比的典型效应的边界条件。

The way humans navigate their social environment and respond to situational affordances is inherently relative. In judging other individuals, people use comparison standards to calibrate their judgment whether this particular person is relatively intelligent or not, exhibiting either assimilative tendencies to adjust their judgment in the direction of a comparison standard or contrastive tendencies to move further away. Although there exist prominent models to explain the antecedents of such effects (most prominently, the selective accessibility model), a major drawback of current comparison research is the lack of a sensitive measure. There is no well-validated measure how much people rely on comparative information and to what extent they exhibit assimilative or contrastive tendencies. Without such a widely accepted measure inconsistencies throughout the literature remain ambiguous as to whether they speak to the underlying theory or are mere collateral damages of certain operationalizations. Specifically, inconsistent results may simply follow from people’s diverging perceptions of a given standard, or because a chosen standards was simply just not extreme enough to prompt contrast, or not moderate enough to prompt assimilation. In the present project we propose to further advance the development of a newly invented Comparative Judgment Task (in the first project phase) into a fine-grained measure of comparative processing. Adopting a novel curve-fitting approach will liberate us from the need to provide a consensual definition of what constitutes extreme, respectively moderate standards. Independent of the exact values and allowing for individual and situational differences thereof, any distribution of judgments as a function of comparison standards in a sine-wave form will a) confirm the predictions of the selective accessibility model and b) allow the extraction of exact parameters of comparative processing and assimilative vs. contrastive tendencies. In the present project phase 2 we will further validate this measure across a host of dimensions (work package 1), scrutinize its psychometric properties (work package 2), and provide illustrations of its experimental validation (work package 3). In the unexpected case of difficulties establishing validity in work package 1, we propose an alternative work package 4 that will scrutinize the existing literature to better understand the boundary conditions of typical effects of assimilation and contrast.