72 college students rated 25 paintings on a like-dislike scale. During the first four judgment trials, half used a response scale with three discriminating categories on one or the other side of the “indifference” interval and a single nondiscriminating category on the other side. Then, all changed to the same balanced 7-category scale for three more trials. Although affectively significant stimuli were used, the unbalanced scales differentially affected the distributions of scale judgments of the paintings. The balanced scale produced expected judgmental changes that made the groups' ratings more comparable.
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