Subjects read a series of behaviors with instructions to form an impression of the person who performed them. In some conditions, subjects were told after reading the behaviors that an administrative error had been made and that certain ones should be disregarded. If the behaviors that subjects were told to disregard were descriptively unrelated to the other behaviors in the series, their influence on trait judgments was greatest when they were presented last. If the behaviors to be disregarded were descriptively inconsistent with the remaining behaviors, their influence was greatest when they were first in the series but subjects were not told to ignore them until after the remaining ones were presented. If the to-be-disregarded behaviors implied the same trait as the remaining ones, they had an influence on trait judgments in both of these conditions. All of these effects were consistently greater when the trait implied by the behaviors to be disregarded was favorable. In fact, when behaviors implied an unfavorable trait, instructions to disregard them often led the behaviors to have a contrast effect on trait judgments. Subjects appeared to base their judgments on implications of the cognitive representations they formed of the person at the time information was first presented. They then adjusted these subjective judgments at the time they reported them to compensate for the influence they perceived the to-be-disregarded information to have, making relatively greater adjustments when this information was unfavorable than when it was favorable. An additional experiment provided further evidence of adjustment processes, but it indicated that subjects also base their judgments on a partial review of the information they have received. A general model of person memory and judgment proposed by Wyer and Unverzagt (1985) provided a satisfactory account of the results of these studies.

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Two studies investigated the effects of image and issue information on evaluations of political candidates. The extent to which voters base their evaluations on stereotypic image information (i.e., candidates' physical attractiveness) and nonstereotypic image information (i.e., individuating personality descriptions of the candidates) was examined. Also of interest were the factors that lead to image-based, as opposed to issue-based, evaluations of the candidates. Results demonstrated that (a) physical appearance influenced evaluations even when individuating personality information was provided, (b) subjects' evaluations were less influenced by their agreement with the candidates' issue positions when image information was presented than when it was not, and (c) subjects' evaluations were less influenced by issue agreement when a candidate's image was evaluatively mixed than when it was evaluatively consistent.

When considering a complex and controversial issue, students may engage in a biased assimilation of the evidence and strengthen their existing attitudes rather than become appreciative of both sides of the issue. However, a consider-the-opposite strategy in which students argue a position contrary to their current opinion may eliminate this biased assimilation. We conducted in-class debates in 3 different courses and randomly assigned students to argue for or against their current attitude on an issue. Our results indicate that arguing a position consistent with one's opinion does produce biased assimilation but that arguing for a position inconsistent with one's opinion reduces this tendency. We discuss how best to design in-class debates to maximize their educational value.

Ss who receive information about a person's traits and behaviors in a social context are likeiy to focus their attention on the pragmatic implications of this information (i.e., why the information was conveyed). To examine this hypothesis, Ss listened to a taped conversation in which a male target (T) and another speaker (O) exchanged anecdotal accounts of T's behavior. Ss typically used O's trait description of T to form an evaluative concept of O rather than of T, whereas T's trait description of himself had no effect on evaluations of him. Ss had better recall of statements O made when they were unfavorable and, therefore, violated a conversational norm to be polite. However, behaviors that T himself mentioned were often recalled better when they were favorable, and therefore, in violation of a normative expectation to appear modest. The inconsistency of T's behaviors with initial trait descriptions of him had little effect on the recall of these behaviors.