MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING AND COGNITION: II. THE RELATION OF EVALUATION TO MULTIDIMENSIONAL MEANING SPACES.

Several groups, initially three, of Ss were asked to judge the similarity of meaning of pairs of adjectives and also to rate the favorableness of the adjectives as descriptions of two different persons. The similarity judgements were analyzed by multidimensional scaling methods to yield two-dimensional space of semantic meaning for the adjectives. It was also found that the favorableness ratings could be reproduced quite accurately from the positions of the words in the space as a linear combination of their coordinates on the two meaning axes. Moreover, the weights for the dimensions were different for the two target persons. A fourth group of subjects was used to clarify some discrepancies. These results are interpreted as reinforcing a cognitive theory which conjectures that the individual has internalized an organized structure for a given set of stimuli and that his judgements and responses are made in terms of it. Differences in reaction to the same stimuli in different contexts is interpreted as using the same structure in different ways. Author