The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

this article should be addressed to R. Goldstone, Psychology Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 (e-mail: rgoldsto@ indiana.edu). Further information can be found at http://cognitrn.psych. indiana.edu/ Similarity in context ROBERT L. GOLDSTONE DOUGLAS L. MEDIN Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois and JAMIN HALBERSTADT Similarity comparisons are highly sensitive to judgment context. Three experiments explore context effects that occur within a single comparison rather than across several trials. Experiment 1 shows reliable intransitivities in which a target is judged to be more similar to stimulus A than to stimulus B, more similar to B than to stimulus C, and more similar to C than to A. Experiment 2 explores the locus of Tversky's (1977) diagnosticity effect in which the relative similarity of two alternatives to a target is influenced by a third alternative. Experiment 3 demonstrates a new violation of choice independence which is explained by object dimensions' becoming foregrounded or backgrounded, depending upon the set of displayed objects. The observed violations of common assumptions to many models of similarity and choice can be accommodated in terms of a dynamic property-weighting process based on the variability and diagnosticity of dimensions

Consumer knowledge is seldom complete or errorless. Therefore, the self-assessed validity of knowledge and consequent knowledge calibration (i.e., the correspondence between self-assessed and actual validity) is an important issue for the study of consumer decision making. In this article we describe methods and models used in calibration research. We then review a wide variety of empirical results indicating that high levels of calibration are achieved rarely, moderate levels that include some degree of systematic bias are the norm, and confidence and accuracy are sometimes completely uncorrelated. Finally, we examine the explanations of miscalibration and offer suggestions for future research. Consumers are overconfident—they think they know more than they actually do. Our simple goal is to evaluate this proposition. Ultimately, we conclude that overconfidence is indeed a robust phenomenon and can be adopted by researchers as a stylized fact about human cognition; however, there are critical qualifications and

In this paper, I report two studies that investigate how company information presentation and sensitivity sequence of questions affect consumer disclosure. In Study One, I conducted a laboratory experiment which systematically manipulated the amount of company information presented to a group of subjects, and the sensitivity sequence of questions used for soliciting their personal information. In Study Two, I addressed the same issues using archival data of 25 websites. In both studies, I found evidence that presenting more company information to consumers and requesting personal information from consumers by following an ascending sensitivity sequence raised the extent of consumer disclosure. Further, company information also improved the attitude and purchase intention of the subjects in the experiment. I discuss the implications of these findings, and draw the relevant managerial insights.

Two experiments examined how practice and time pressure influence holistic processing, defined as the relative importance of feature interactions, in a face preference task. Participants rated 32 cartoon faces that varied along five dichotomous features (Experiment 1) or 27 realistic morphed faces that varied along three trichotomous dimensions (Experiment 2), under high and low time pressure (operationalized as a short vs. long stimulus presentation time), over a series of experimental blocks. In both experiments, the overall importance of facial features, but not of feature interactions, increased over blocks and, in one condition of Experiment 1, under high vs. low time pressure. Analyses of idiosyncratic importance indicated that the feature effects were due to the increasing importance of participantsÕ idiosyncratically most influential features. Functional differences between face preferences and face recognition are offered to explain and predict when facial features will be processed independently vs. holistically.