Connotations and cognitive conflict: A comment on the Kuhlman, Miller and Gungor results

In a recent study, Kuhlman et al. (1973) investigated the effects of differences in connotations on cognitive conflict in an experiment following Hammond's (1965) "lens model" interpersonal conflict (IPC) paradigm. The conflict task was a political decisions task which required the subjects to infer the future level of democratic institutions in a country from two cues: (1) The amount of state control over the individual (2) and the extent to which government was determined by elections. The subjects rated the concepts of "state control" and "elections" on four evaluative scales of the semantic differential. From these ratings, connotatively different pairs and connotatively similar pairs were created. In addition, the degree of denotative differences was varied in the experiment. Denotatively different pairs were created by training one of the subjects in each pair to use only the state-control cue and the other subject to use only the elections cue. Denotatively similar pairs were created by training the subjects in each pair to use the same cue.
After the training, the subjects in each pair went through 20 conflict trials. On each of these trials, they were given a card depicting the level of state control and the level of elections for a country. The subjects (I) studied this card, (2) announced their individual judgments of the criterion, (3) discussed the case until they could reach a joint judgment, acceptable to both of them, after which (4) they were informed of the correct answer and went on to the next trial. For further details on the procedure, the reader is referred to the original paper by Kuhl-man et al. (1973).