Personality, Involvement and Extremity of Judgement

Abstract

It is widely believed that persons with certain personality characteristics (e.g. authoritarianism, dogmatism, cognitive simplicity) have a general tendency to make extreme judgements on rating scales and sorting tasks. This belief rests upon two assumptions: that extreme responding is an individually consistent characteristic across tasks, and that such a characteristic is in fact associated with the personality traits. These assumptions are examined in four separate investigations. The generality of extreme responding is adequately demonstrated, but no general relationship with personality is found. A model is developed which introduces ‘involvement’ as a mediating explanatory variable. In this context involvement is defined as a compound of construct relevance and stimulus importance. The model is borne out by a further empirical test, showing that personality and extreme responding are in fact linked when involvement is sufficiently high.