The influence of the analogical context on the similarity judgements of compared events

NICOLAS OBERHOLZER; MAXIMO TRENCH; RICARDO MINERVINO

San Sebastián

Congreso; 17th Meeting of the European Society for cognitive Psychology; 2011

European Society for cognitive Psychology

An experiment was carried out to demonstrate that judgments of analogical relatedness between two events vary as a function of the analogy in which they take part. In a control condition, participants used a 7-point Likert-scale to rate the analogical similarity of two events (e.g., Mary bought a play station vs. John borrowed a Wii). In the two experimental conditions, participants received these same events framed within base and target analogs aimed at rendering both events more or less similar. For instance, whereas in the pro-similarity condition the protagonists criticize each other’s actions as having broken their agreement to devote exclusively to their studies, in the less-similarity condition the protagonists criticize each other’s actions as having broken their agreement to cut unnecessary expenses. As predicted, similarity scores assigned by participants under the pro-similarity condition were much higher than scores given by participants under the less-similarity condition, with scores from the control condition falling somewhere in between. Data proved that the analogical similarity between two compared situations depends on the way in which they are related to the broader analogy in which they participate, thus posing a challenge to the role of semantics within traditional theoretical approaches of analogical mapping