Of gnomes and leprechauns: The recruitment of recent and categorical contexts in social judgment

Participants rated schematic faces from two categories, gnomes and leprechauns, on feature widths and pleasantness of facial configuration. Three target faces shared critical facial features across categories while two contextual faces extended the range for that category to include either very wide or very narrow features. In Experiment 1a, results indicated contextual effects on judgments of target faces when they were rated in separate categorical blocks [Wedell, D. H., & Pettibone, J. C. (1999). Preference and the contextual basis of ideals in judgment and choice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 346–361], but not when faces from both categories were rated together in Experiment 1b. Two additional experiments explored this failure to use categorical information. Categorical context was found to produce contrast effects on descriptive ratings of feature width when participants were forced to rely on name cues rather than actual faces in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, both contrast effects on descriptive ratings and assimilation effects on ideals for pleasantness were found when the names for the faces were learned separately for each category. These results identify constraints on the nature of category-based stereotyping effects on judgment while isolating the influence of recent and categorical context.