Watkins M J, Peynircioğlu Z F
J Pers Soc Psychol. 1984 May;46(5):1005-16. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.46.5.1005.
The meaning change hypothesis says that the individual items of information from which an impression of someone is formed tend to be perceived in a way consistent with the overall impression. It is argued here that the evidence usually considered as the principal experimental support for this hypothesis is artifactual, the product of a spurious method of determining perceived meaning. We describe a new method in which, following a series of person descriptions, subjects try to recall from each description a critical trait with the aid of a roughly synonymous cue word that is evaluatively either consistent or inconsistent with the description as a whole. The meaning change hypothesis predicts a higher level of recall when the cue word and the overall description are evaluatively consistent. We show that although this prediction holds with at least one kind of person description (Experiments 1 and 2), it does not hold with the kind most often used in impression formation research (Experiments 3, 4, and 5).
意义改变假说认为，形成对某人的印象所依据的各个信息项往往会以与整体印象一致的方式被感知。本文认为，通常被视为该假说主要实验支持的证据是人为的，是一种确定感知意义的虚假方法的产物。我们描述了一种新方法，在一系列人物描述之后，受试者借助一个在评价上与整体描述一致或不一致的大致同义词线索词，试图从每个描述中回忆出一个关键特征。意义改变假说预测，当线索词与整体描述在评价上一致时，回忆水平会更高。我们表明，尽管这一预测在至少一种人物描述中成立（实验1和实验2），但在印象形成研究中最常用的那种描述中并不成立（实验3、实验4和实验5）。
