JUDGING SOCIAL AND NONSOCIAL CONTINGENCIES

The sensitivity of college students' judgments of relations between ev ents in social and nonsocial situations was investigated. In Experimen t I, both social and nonsocial contingency judgments increased as a fu nction of increasing objective contingency between on-off vocal activi ties (social) and between lights and tones (nonsocial). In Experiment 2, this effect was replicated for the social task when participants we re not first told that they would be asked to judge contingencies. Exp eriments 3 and 4 replicated the results of Experiment I when procedura l modifications were made. In Experiments I and 4, conversations with higher contingencies were evaluated more positively than those with lo wer contingencies. The contingency of the conversation frill predicted contingency judgments when the judged quality of the conversations wa s statistically controlled. These findings suggest a generalizability from past research on nonsocial contingency judgment tasks to the judg ment of contingency occurring in dyadic interaction.