Vividness effect on communicationHow concrete and colourful language can influence people’s judgements

Participants in this experiment were asked to judge the fitness (or unfitness) of a parent

They read transcripts of recordings describing a mother living with her seven year old son

The transcripts contained 8 arguments for and 8 arguments against the mother

Please assess the parental fitness of this woman

Participants were split into two groups

The first group read transcripts that gave extra vivid details on the positive interactions between the mother and her son e.g. brushing her son’s teeth at night

They were just given the facts for the negative arguments e.g. her son visiting the school nurse to tend to a scratch on his elbow

How sweet they

have matching t-shirts!

She obviously takes an interest in

what he’s passionate about

Kids have bumps

and scrapes all the time

The school nurse took good care of him as you would

expect

The second group read transcripts that gave extra vivid details around the negative events

They were just given the facts for the positive interactions between the mother and her son

For both groups the extra details were carefully designed to be irrelevant in terms of judging the mother’s parental fitness

This is a pretty normal

bedtime routine

I would expect all parents to

help brush their child’s teeth

I wonder how he scraped

his elbow?

The school nurse spilt

Mercurochrome while cleaning up his scrape

– his mother should have taken care of

him first.

The facts remained identical in all scenarios however those who heard vivid details for positive interactions rated the mother as a fitter parent (5.8 out of 10)

Those who heard vivid details for negative events rated the mother as a less fit parent (4.3 out of 10)

Conclusions

1. The jurors made different judgements based on irrelevant vivid details given in arguments

2. The extra details made it easier for jurors to recall particular arguments (either positive or negative) and made these arguments more credible

3. This is an example of the availability heuristic in action – immediately available examples having a disproportionate effect on the jurors overall assessment

Reference

Can the availability heuristic explain vividness effects? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986) 26—36 Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis