Estimation of career potential based on age, sex, and personality information

Juliet Popper Shaffer
1978 Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society  
In two experiments, college students were asked to rate estimated degree of career success for a series of stimulus persons described by personality-trait adjectives. Experiment 1 also included sex of stimulus persons and Experiment 2 included sex and age of stimulus persons in the descriptions. In both experiments, the descriptions were varied systematically in number, polarity (positivity or negativity), and extremity of adjectives. Male stimulus persons were rated significantly higher than
more » ... male stimulus persons and younger stimulus persons were rated significantly higher than older stimulus persons on the average. The difference due to sex of stimulus person was a decreasing function of, while the difference due to age was unrelated to, number of adjectives. Both the sex and age effects interacted in complex ways with polarity and extremity of adjectives. There have been a large number of studies of the process by which individuals combine different items of information in arriving at some type of judgment concerning a person. Most of the studies have used personality-trait descriptive adjectives as the items and likability as the characteristic to be rated. In the studies reported here, stimulus persons were described in terms of both personality-trait adjeCtives and what might be termed demographic characteristics, specifically, sex and age, and were rated on expected degree of success in a career involving interaction with others. The study was designed to assess the effects on the ratings of sex and age of the stimulus persons, and their possible interactions with sex of subjects and with the following characteristics of the adjective descriptions: number, polarity (positivity or negativity), and extremity of adjectives. It was hoped that the information gained would be useful in developing a model to account for the joint effects of these two different types of information (personality and demograpltic) on the assessments. EXPERIMENT 1 Method Subjects. The subjects were 80 college students, 40 women and 40 men, fulfilling a research participation requirement in introductory psychology. Materials and Procedure. Each subject received 12 practice trials followed by 96 main trials. On each trial, the stimulus person was a woman or man presumably described by acquaintances as having the designated personality traits. The adjectives used in constructing descriptions were taken from four value ranges as determined by Anderson's (1968) ratings: The author wishes to thank Jeanne Hierl, Carol Lollman, and Peggy Hineline for assistance in conducting the experiments. Requests for reprints should be sent to 120 extremely positive, moderately positive, moderately negative, and extremely negative. Each description on the main trials included two, three, or six adjectives, all from the same value range; the descriptions were balanced so that all adjectives appeared with equal relative frequencies within the two-, three-, and six-adjective sets of descriptions. Each subject received half of the descriptions for a male stimulus person and half for a female stimulus person; the description-sex combinations were counterbalanced across subjects. The particular adjectives used and the details of construction and presentation of the stimuli were the same as those used by Shaffer (1977, Experiment 1). Design. The experiment was carried out in an equal-N mixed analysis of variance design, with two between-subjects factors: sex of subject (SS) and list combination (LC, designating which adjective descriptions were combined with male and which with female stimulus persons); and four within-subjects factors: sex of stimulus person (SP), positivity or negativity of adjectives (PN), moderate or extreme values of adjectives (ME), and number of adjectives (NA). Results Male stimulus persons were rated higher, on the average, than female stimulus persons [F(I ,76) = 10.56, P < .002]. This effect did not interact with value or extremity of adjectives, nor with their interaction [F(1,76) = .29, 1.14, and .06, respectively], but it did interact Significantly with the number of adjectives [F(2 ,152) = 5.96, p < .01]. While the difference between male and female stimulus persons was virtually identical for two-and three-adjective descriptions, it disappeared for six-adjective descriptions. The difference in mean rating for male and female stimulus persons was in the same direction for both male and female subjects, but was greater for male subjects; the interaction between sex of stimulus person and sex of subject approached significance [F(1 ,76) = 2.88, .10> p > .05]. Separate analyses indicated that the effect of sex of stimulus person was Significant for male subjects [F(l ,38) = 11.20,
doi:10.3758/bf03336784 fatcat:qig4sczeynhfxbegi6zt7qxvny