When Discounting Fails. Conditions Under Which Individuals Use Discredited Information in Making a Judgment

Two experiments examine the conditions that promote successful discounting of knowledge in making a judgment. Subjects first learned a set of arguments describing a person. Later, they were told to use a subset of these arguments to judge the person. This was done in one of two ways. Half of the subjects received instructions specifying the subset of arguments that were actually to be used in the judgment. For the other half, the supplementary subset was specified; that is, they were told which of the arguments were to be ignored. As a result, in the latter condition the to-be-ignored arguments were salient, whereas in the former condition the to-be-used arguments were salient. Both experiments found that discounting was most successful when the to-be-ignored arguments were salient. Orthogonally to the salience manipulation, the experiments varied the extent to which the arguments were integrated before discounting. Experiment 2 demonstrated that discounting fails when the arguments were represented in an integrative rather than a discrete manner. The implications of these findings for theories of discounting are discussed.