The Influence of Irrelevant Information on Price Judgment

The paper presents an experiment that tests the influence of an irrelevant to the task feature (namely the color of the fonts used) on the judgment of rent prices of various apartments. The rents were presented with either green or red digits that stand for the price of the apartments. Participants judged how expensive the prices are from their perspective on a 7 point scale. As result it turned out that the rents obtained different ratings depending on the color with which they were presented, i.e. there was an influence of the irrelevant to the task dimension “color” on human judgment of a quite abstract dimension such as price. The difference is small but significant. Three possible explanations of these contextual effects are discussed with respect to the specific material used in this experiment. It was argued that spreading activation (Kokinov et al., 2004, Petkov, 2005a, 2005b) provides a better explanation of the reported results than the low-level perceptual “recalibration” (Marks, 1988, 1992, 1994, Marks and Warner, 1991, Arieh and Marks, 2002) or perceptual learning mechanisms (Goldstone, 1995,1998).