What is impression formation

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All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Actor and object are the same person in self-directed actions such as the "The lawyer praised himself" or various kinds of self-harm.

Impression-formation research [19] indicates that self-directed actions reduce the positivity of actors on the Evaluation, Potency, and Activity dimensions. Self-directed actions therefore are not an optimal way to confirm the good, potent, lively identities that people normally want to maintain. Rather self-directed actions are a likely mode of expression for individuals who want to manifest their low self-esteem and self-efficacy. Early work on impression formation [20] used action sentences like, "The kind man praises communists," and "Bill helped the corrupt senator," assuming that modifier-noun combinations amalgamate into a functional unit.

A later study [21] found that a modifier-noun combination does form an overall impression that works in action descriptions like a noun alone. The action sentences in that study combined identities with status characteristics, traits , moods , and emotions. Another study [22] focused specifically on emotion descriptors combined with identities e. Studies of various kinds of impression formation have been conducted in Canada, [23] Japan, [24] and Germany. For example, in every culture that has been studied, Evaluation of an actor was determined by-among other things-a stability effect, a suffusion from the behavior Evaluation, and an interaction that rewarded an actor for performing a behavior whose Evaluation was consistent with the Evaluation of the object person.

On the other hand, each culture weighted the core effects distinctively. For example, the impact of behavior-object Evaluation consistency was much smaller in Germany than in the U. Additionally, impression-formation processes involved some unique interactions in each culture. For example, attribute-identity amalgamations in Germany involved some Potency and Activity interactions that did not appear in other cultures. A book, Surveying Cultures [26] reviewed cross-cultural research on impression-formation processes, and provided guidelines for conducting impression-formation studies in cultures where the processes are unexplored currently.

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Recent Blogs Community portal forum. Register Don't have an account? Impression formation. Edit source History Talk 0. For instance, she might listen to all the traits that you mention, decide how positive or negative each one is, and then add the traits together or average them. Consider what might happen if you gave Rianna the following information:. Once she has these numbers, she could then either add them together or average them to get an overall judgment.

Based on this scoring, Rianna would probably decide that she likes Amir more than Connor. Of course, different people might weight the traits in somewhat different ways, and this would lead different people to draw different impressions about Amir and Connor. But there is pretty good agreement among most people about the meaning of traits, at least in terms of the overall positivity or negativity of each trait, and thus most people would be likely to draw similar conclusions.

Perhaps these new traits would make Rianna like Amir more after all, they do add new positive information about him. But perhaps they might make her like him less if the new, moderately positive information diluted the existing positive impression she has already formed about him.

One way to think about this is to consider whether Rianna might be adding the traits together or averaging them. If she is averaging the traits together, however, then Rianna will probably like him less than she did before, because the new, more moderate information tends to dilute the initial impressions.

It turns out that in most cases, our judgments are better predicted by mental averaging than by mental adding Mills, What this means is that when you are telling someone about another person and you are trying to get him or her to like the person, you should say the most positive things that you know but leave out the more moderate although also positive information.

The moderate information is more likely to dilute, rather than enhance, the more extreme information. Although the averaging model is quite good at predicting final impressions, it is not perfect.

This is because some traits are simply weighted more heavily than others. Although the professor behaved in the same way for both groups, the students nevertheless reacted very differently to him. Moreover, the effects of warmth and coolness seem to be wired into our bodily responses.

In short, the particular dimension warm versus cold makes a big difference in how we perceive people—much bigger than do other traits. As a result, the traits of warm and cold are known as central traits, which are characteristics that have a very strong influence on our impressions of others Asch, The powerful influence of central traits is due to two things.

One, they lead us to make inferences about other traits that might not have been mentioned. Be friendly, nice, and interested in what they say. This attention you pay to the other will be more powerful than any other characteristics that you might try to display to them. The importance of perceptions of warmth-coldness has been confirmed in many other contexts.

The primacy effect describes the tendency for information that we learn first to be weighted more heavily than is information that we learn later. One demonstration of the primacy effect was conducted by Solomon Asch In his research, participants learned some traits about a person and then made judgments about him. One half of the participants saw this list of traits:. You may have noticed something interesting about these two lists—they contain exactly the same traits but in reverse order.

Asch discovered something interesting in his study: because the traits were the same, we might have expected that both groups would form the same impression of the person, but this was not at all the case. Rather, Asch found that the participants who heard the first list, in which the positive traits came first, formed much more favorable impressions than did those who heard the second list, in which the negative traits came first. Similar findings were found by Edward Jones , who had participants watch one of two videotapes of a woman taking an intelligence test.

In each video, the woman correctly answered the same number of questions and got the same number wrong. However, when the woman got most of her correct answers in the beginning of the test but got more wrong near the end, she was seen as more intelligent than when she got the same number correct but got more correct at the end of the test. Primacy effects also show up in other domains, even in those that seem really important.

This is not to say that it is always good to be first. In some cases, the information that comes last can be most influential. Recency effects , in which information that comes later is given more weight , although much less common than primacy effects, may sometimes occur. For example, de Bruin found that in competitions such as the Eurovision Song Contest and ice skating, higher marks were given to competitors who performed last.

Considering the primacy effect in terms of the cognitive processes central to human information processing leads us to understand why it can be so powerful. One reason is that humans are cognitive misers. Because we desire to conserve our energy, we are more likely to pay more attention to the information that comes first and less likely to attend to information that comes later.

Another reason for the primacy effect is that the early traits lead us to form an initial expectancy about the person, and once that expectancy is formed, we tend to process information in ways that keep that expectancy intact.

Thinking back to Chapter 2 and the discussion of social cognition, we can see that this of course is a classic case of assimilation—once we have developed a schema, it becomes difficult to change it.

When the information about the negative features comes later, these negatives will be assimilated into the existing knowledge more than the existing knowledge is accommodated to fit the new information. This is an important factor in explaining the halo effect , which is the influence of a global positive evaluation of a person on perceptions of their specific traits. Put simply, if we get an initially positive general impression of someone, we often see their specific traits more positively.

You can be sure that it would be good to take advantage of the primacy and halo effects if you are trying to get someone you just met to like you. Begin with your positive characteristics, and only bring the negatives up later. This will create a much better outcome than beginning with the negatives. Ackerman, J. Psychological Science, 17 10 , — Adams, R. Effects of gaze on amygdala sensitivity to anger and fear faces. Science, , Ambady, N. Toward a histology of social behavior: Judgmental accuracy from thin slices of the behavioral stream.

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