Social judgment theory

Social judgment theory (SJT) is a self-persuasion theory proposed by Carolyn Sherif, Muzafer Sherif, and Carl Hovland, defined by Sherif and Sherif as the perception and evaluation of an idea by comparing it with current attitudes. According to this theory, an individual weighs every new idea, comparing it with the individual's present point of view to determine where it should be placed on the attitude scale in an individual's mind. SJT is the subconscious sorting out of ideas that occurs at the instant of perception. Social judgment theory (SJT) is a self-persuasion theory proposed by Carolyn Sherif, Muzafer Sherif, and Carl Hovland, defined by Sherif and Sherif as the perception and evaluation of an idea by comparing it with current attitudes. According to this theory, an individual weighs every new idea, comparing it with the individual's present point of view to determine where it should be placed on the attitude scale in an individual's mind. SJT is the subconscious sorting out of ideas that occurs at the instant of perception. Social judgment theory is a framework that studies human judgment. It is a meta-theory that directs research on cognitive perspective, which is how you perceive the situations. The psychophysical principle involved for example, is when a stimulus is farther away from one's judgmental anchor, a contrast effect is highly possible; when the stimulus is close to the anchor, an assimilation effect can happen. Social judgment theory represents an attempt to generalize psychophysical judgmental principles and the findings to the social judgment. With the person's preferred position serving as the judgmental anchor, SJT is a theory that mainly focuses on the internal processes of a person's own judgment in regards to the relation within a communicated message. The concept was intended to be an explanatory method designed to detail when persuasive messages are most likely to succeed. Attitude change is the fundamental objective of persuasive communication. SJT seeks to specify the conditions under which this change takes place and predict the direction and extent of the attitude change, while attempting to explain how likely a person might be to change his or her opinion, the probable direction of that change, their tolerance toward the opinion of others, and their level of commitment to their position. The SJT researchers claimed expectations regarding attitude change could be based on the message receiver's level of involvement, the structure of the stimulus (and how many alternatives it allows), and the value (credibility) of the source. SJT arose from social psychology and was based on laboratory findings resulting from experiments. These experiments studied the mental assessment of physical objects, referred to at the time as psychophysical research. Subjects were asked to compare some aspect of an object, such as weight or color, to another, different object. The researchers discovered that, when a standard was provided for comparison, the participants categorized the objects relative to the aspects of the standard. SJT focuses the conceptual structure of the framework and traces its development from the roots in Brunswik's probabilistic functionalism to its present form. For example, if a very heavy object was used as the standard in assessing weight, then the other objects would be judged to be relatively lighter than if a very light object was used as the standard. The standard is referred to as an 'anchor'. This work involving physical objects was applied to psychosocial work, in which a participant's limits of acceptability on social issues are studied. Social issues include areas such as religion and politics. The traditional view of attitude neglects an individual's emotional and motivational influences as well as the social context in which the attitude(s) are formed. Meaning an individual is more likely to assume a speaker with authority will be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. Wyer and Gruenfeld (1995) noted that 'much of our theoretical and empirical knowledge about social information processing has been obtained under laboratory conditions that only faintly resemble the social situations in which information is usually acquired in everyday life'. Rooted in judgment theory, which is concerned with the discrimination and categorization of stimuli, it attempts to explain how attitudes are expressed, judged, and modified. A judgment occurs when a person compares at least two stimuli and makes a choice about them. With regard to social stimuli specifically, judgment processes incorporate both past experiences and present circumstances. Sherif et al. (1965) defined attitudes as 'the stands the individual upholds and cherishes about objects, issues, persons, groups, or institutions' (p. 4). Researchers must infer attitudes from behavior. The behavior can be in response to arranged or naturally occurring stimuli. True attitudes are fundamental to self-identity and are complex, and thus can be difficult to change. One of the ways in which the SJT developers observed attitudes was through the 'Own Categories Questionnaire'. This method requires research participants to place statements into piles of most acceptable, most offensive, neutral, and so on, in order for researchers to infer their attitudes. This categorization, an observable judgment process, was seen by Sherif and Hovland (1961) as a major component of attitude formation. As a judgment process, categorization and attitude formation are a product of recurring instances, so that past experiences influence decisions regarding aspects of the current situation. Therefore, attitudes are acquired. Social judgment theory also illustrates how people contrast their personal positions on issues to others' positions around them. Aside from having their personal opinion, individuals hold latitudes of what they think is acceptable or unacceptable in general for other people's view. Social attitudes are not cumulative, especially regarding issues where the attitude is extreme. This means that a person may not agree with less extreme stands relative to his or her position, even though they may be in the same direction. Furthermore, even though two people may seem to hold identical attitudes, their 'most preferred' and 'least preferred' alternatives may differ. Thus, a person's full attitude can only be understood in terms of what other positions he or she finds acceptable or unacceptable, in addition to his or her own stand. Sherif saw an attitude as amalgam of three zones or latitudes. There is the latitude of acceptance, which is the range of ideas that a person sees as reasonable or worthy of consideration; the latitude of rejection, which is the range of ideas that a person sees as unreasonable or objectionable; and, finally, the latitude of noncommitment, which is the range of ideas that a person sees as neither acceptable nor questionable.