Justice and the human alarm system: The impact of exclamation points and flashing lights on the justice judgment process

FORMAL REFERENCE:
Rijpkema, Mark et al. "Justice and the human alarm system: The impact of exclamation points and flashing lights on the justice judgment process." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, no. 2 (March 2008): 201-219. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 26, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS: pp 203-216

SUMMARY:

“… it should be the case that presenting social cues that are even only subtly related to alarming conditions will lead people to form more extreme procedural and outcome justice judgments…. we will test the implications of this line of reasoning by presenting exclamation points … to our participants. We argue that people have learned to associate exclamation points with signals to be alert that something is or will be going on.”

This social psychology paper used exclamation points in two experiments, hypothesizing that seeing an exclamation point alone would cause participants to become more alert or alarmed, which would then heighten sensitivity to alarming situations related to social justice/fairness. Interestingly, the hypothesis was verified: participants were indeed more sensitive or extreme in their judgments.

This basically establishes that, at least on its own, the exclamation mark heightens alertness and/or alarm. It really does grab the attention, perhaps because people have been conditioned to view the symbol as an imperative or emphatic relation to danger or warning.

ASSESSMENT:
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology is reputable and peer-reviewed. While the researchers and study were Netherlands-based, they represent major research institutions such as Utrecht and Duke (taken abroad, I guess). The research is current (2008) and the sample size was above 100 in each test. The literature review was quite long, and the study itself was based on a related avenue of research about the “human alarm system.” My review concluded that the authors have published other papers, in some cases many other papers.

REFLECTION:

I will use this to establish that one previously-investigated interpretation of exclamation marks is that of alarm and heightened awareness, but mentioning that the latter is only implied as it was only sought in the context of social fairness. Therefore, we should investigate this further in a more specific context. The authors suggest further research, though not into exclamation marks specifically.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

exclamation mark, alarm, clear research, interpretation, alertness, association