L'intégration des informations dans le jugement social : niveau de réussite, niveau de difficulté et de capacité jugée

Summary : Information integration in social judgment. Level of performance, level of task difficulty and assessment of competence. How does a naive subject integrale information about a person's performance in an exam and the difficulty of this exam, when he has to judge the person's competence ? In the first experiment, independant groups of subjects were used in each condition of a complete factorial design : 3 levels of Success X 3 levels of Difficulty X 2 Sex of the person to be judged ; Success is varied through the score obtained in an exam; Difficulty, through the score obtained in generai by people ; Sex, through a Christian name ; the subjects were female students of several universities. An analysis of variance shows a main effect of Success and Difficulty, an interaction between Success and Difficulty and a triple interaction. Partial analyses show that judgement of competence increases with Success, but it increases with Difficulty only at the low level of success for the two sexes and at the middle level of success for the man. In a second experiment, with the same factors, procedure and female students, each subject had to judge 9 persons, each representing a combination of one level of Success and one level of Difficulty ; these persons are masculine for half the subjects and feminine for the other ones. There was a main effect of each factor and an interaction between Success and Difficulty ; partial analyses of variance show that judgment increases with Difficulty at each level of Success for the two sexes ; but the effect of Difficulty is stronger at the low level of Success. The results are discussed in terms of differential usefulness of informations and models of information integration. Key words : information integration, social judgment, sex.