Combining visual and verbal information in an impression-formation task.

Female students rated males characterized by a photograph and 2 personalitytrait adjectives in terms of desirability as a date. The experimental design tested how these 3 component pieces of information were integrated to form the overall impression. The results supported the hypothesis that the 2 adjectives were simply averaged together, but there was a strong interaction between adjectives and photograph. The adjectives had less effect in the context of the less desirable photographs. This was interpreted as a discounting effect, in line with the social nature of the judgment task. It was noted that the averaging model would be consistent with the interaction if discounting produced lower values of the weight parameters of the adjectives. The averaging formulation was also consistent with the comparisons between ratings of photographs alone and photographs plus adjectives.