Attitudes Accentuate Attributes in Social Judgment: The Combined Effects of Substance Use, Depression, and Technical Incompetence on Judgments of Professional Impairment

Evaluative reactions involving attitudes have been shown to affect social judgments under certain conditions. Researchers assume that personality traits and behaviors toward which people hold strong attitudes evoke evaluative reactions. Such reactions influence the importance of these attributes as they are integrated with other information during the formation of social judgments and, in part, account for the accentuation effect. Social judgment was studied in the context of professional-impairment impressions provided by nurses. Data were modeled using hierarchical techniques to examine the interaction between within-judge differences in attribute weighting and between-judges differences in attitudes. Social judgments of fictitious targets were moderated by individual differences in judges' attitudes toward negative target attributes; some, but not all, attributes were accentuated as predicted.