Assimilation and contrast effects

Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) is quoted to have written "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it.

"[2] In 1979, psychologists speculated about the mechanisms of biased assimilation in that one gives "any information that suggests less damaging ‘alternative interpretations’" such importance to use it as proof for one's belief.

Complementary to the stated definition, it describes the effect of a felt psychological closeness of social surroundings that influence the current self-representation and self-knowledge.

This shows how access to the information of politicians' scandals was included in the representation of the target stimulus, i.e. an assimilation effect.

A series of studies found assimilation effects when asking participants to rate the attractiveness of faces that were presented simultaneously.

Whenever researchers conduct attitude surveys and design questionnaires, they have to take judgment processes and resulting assimilation effects into account.

[11][12] When they first asked participants how happy they were with their dating or how satisfied they were with their relationship (a specific question that functions as a moderate context stimulus) and subsequently asked the participants how happy they were with their life in general (general question), they found assimilation effects.

To avoid assimilation effects in science communication Tim Caulfield has suggested to "preface any new finding with what the literature says, on balance, about the topic in question; readers might then understand that any marked aberration is less likely to be true.