The Effects of Evaluation on Organizational Processing

Abstract

This research investigated the idea that evaluation would influence individuals' ability to recognize the similarities among sequentially presented concepts. Subjects were given a list of words to categorize in front of an audience or alone within a specified amount of time. Although audience presence had no significant effect on free recall, clustering scores indicated that subjects' ability to organize information decreased in the presence of an audience. This finding supports the hypothesis that audience presence can reduce available processing resources and thereby reduce the likelihood of shared-feature (i.e., organizational) processing. The implications of this finding for stereotypical categorizations in person perception were discussed.