| Abstract: | Social cognition theory asserts that perceivers (raters) assign stimulus persons (ratees) to social categories. These categories help the raters encode, store, and recall information. In a longitudinal design that represented a performance appraisal situation, this study examined the effects of information about a ratee's category membership on the amount of information that raters collected about the ratee prior to rating. One hundred fourteen subjects participated in three separate experimental sessions which spanned a 3-week time period. Among other tasks, subjects were required to rate a subordinate who was described in a manner which made it either difficult or easy to assign the subordinate to a social category. It was predicted and found that raters of ratees who were easily categoriezed spent less time observing the ratees' performance than raters of ratees who were less easily classified. Furthermore, results indicated that it was the effect of rater categorization on observation time that was critical to rating accuracy. |
