Impression formation

Like in the real world, the first impression a person leaves in a computer-mediated environment depends on his or her online appearance. The present study manipulates an avatar's pupil size, eyeblink frequency, and the viewing angle to investigate whether nonverbal visual characteristics are responsible for the impression made. We assessed how participants (N = 56) evaluate these avatars in terms of different attributes. The findings show that avatars with large pupils and slow eye blink frequency are perceived as more sociable and more attractive. Compared to avatars seen in full frontal view or from above, avatars seen from below were rated as most sociable, self-confident, and attractive. Moreover, avatars' pupil size and eyeblink frequency escape the viewer's conscious perception but still influence how people evaluate them. The findings have wide-ranging applied implications for avatar design.

This study examines the influence of an audience's knowledge of the group membership of a target on the communication of information about this target. Participants were asked to rank order five traits to describe a person labelled as an engineer to an imaginary audience. Overall they were more likely to choose traits stereotypical of the target's social category when the audience was presented as unaware than aware of this category membership. Within-participants analyses also indicated that the perceived stereotypicality of a trait predicted its communication more positively when the audience was unaware than aware of the target's social category. These results can be interpreted in line with the maxim of quantity (Grice, 1975): stereotype-consistent information being more informative when the audience is unaware than aware of the target's social category, it is more likely to be communicated in the former than in the latter case. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) ...

Motor movements that embody approach and avoidance shape individuals' affective and evaluative responses to objects. In two studies we investigate how approach and avoidance impact participants' judgments of ecologically valid targets: other humans. One trait relevant to the approach or avoidance of other humans is trustworthiness. Trustworthy people can be safely approached, and untrustworthy people should be avoided. We examined whether arm contractions of approach and avoidance enhanced or diminished trust toward others, respectively. Perceived trustworthiness, relative to untrustworthiness, potentiated arm flexion (approach; Study 1). conversely, arm flexion relative to extension led to increased perceptions of trust (Study 2). Thus, beyond motivational, cognitive, and emotional processes, embodied cues impact impression formation.

This is an extended draft, including additional information, of: Peeters, G. (1991). Relational information processing and the implicit personality concept. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive/European Bulletin of Cognitive Psychology, 11, 259-278. https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/127169/1/1991CAHIERS_RPM_Personality.pdf

Three schemata relevant to the inference of traits attributed to a and b from respectively reciprocal liking and disliking relations between a and b are derived from the research literature: (a) Homogeneity according to which likable traits would be attributed to a and b if they like each other, while dislikable traits if they dislike each other; (b) balance according to which more similarity would be attributed to a and b if they like each other than if they dislike each other, the relative similarity effect being localized on a likableness dimension; (c) positivity bias according to which favorable traits would be attributed irrespective of the stimulus information given.An experiment is reported which provides support for the three schemata with the exception that no unequivocal evidence is obtained for the restriction of the balance effect to a likableness dimension. Further, individual Ss are found not to have stable preferences for particular schemata but to switch readily fro...

The sleeper effect occurs when the persuasiveness of a message increases with the passage of time. Aithough the existence of the sleeper effect has been demonstrated in several recent investigations, the conditions necessary for its observation have not been specified. In the present research, a cun-ent view of memory operation is offered to predict the occurrence of the sleeper effect. This view is examined in two experiments. The findings are interpreted as being congenial with the memory explanation. The status of sleeper effect research is assessed in light of these findings.

In making a new judgment, a person can access relevant past judgments and/ or process the stimulus information underlying these judgments. The present study is concerned with (i) the conditions under which past judgments are used instead of stimulus information and (ii) the effects that repeated past judgments have on the representation of the stimulus information in memory. Three experiments were conducted using an impression formation task. Subjects were presented with trait descriptions of hypothetical individuals and were asked to make one, three, or five impression judgments on the basis of each description. It was hypothesized that a new impression will tend to be based on an old one, rather than on trait information, as a function of the ease with which the new impression can be inferred from the old. Ease of inference, in turn, will depend on the similarity of the two impressions and the availability of the past impression. The results of the three studies are consistent with this hypothesis: When past judgments were available, (Expermints 1 and 3), the extent to which they, rather than the trait information, determined the present judgment increased with the similarity between them. However, when another activity interpolated between the old and the new judgments (Experiment 2), thus making the past judgment more dimcult to access, the tendency to use the latter diminished considerably. Afterjudging, subjects were given a surprise recognition test for the trait information. Recognition accuracy was superior following a series of related judgments than following unrelated judgments, suggesting that the elaborations and inferences

In making a new judgment, a person can access relevant past judgments and/ or process the stimulus information underlying these judgments. The present study is concerned with (i) the conditions under which past judgments are used instead of stimulus information and (ii) the effects that repeated past judgments have on the representation of the stimulus information in memory. Three experiments were conducted using an impression formation task. Subjects were presented with trait descriptions of hypothetical individuals and were asked to make one, three, or five impression judgments on the basis of each description. It was hypothesized that a new impression will tend to be based on an old one, rather than on trait information, as a function of the ease with which the new impression can be inferred from the old. Ease of inference, in turn, will depend on the similarity of the two impressions and the availability of the past impression. The results of the three studies are consistent with this hypothesis: When past judgments were available, (Expermints 1 and 3), the extent to which they, rather than the trait information, determined the present judgment increased with the similarity between them. However, when another activity interpolated between the old and the new judgments (Experiment 2), thus making the past judgment more dimcult to access, the tendency to use the latter diminished considerably. Afterjudging, subjects were given a surprise recognition test for the trait information. Recognition accuracy was superior following a series of related judgments than following unrelated judgments, suggesting that the elaborations and inferences

We look at how some basic choices in the management of turns influence the impression that people get from an agent. We look at scales concerning personality, emotion and interpersonal stance. We do this by a person perception study, or rather an agent perception study, using simulated conversations that systematically vary basic turn-taking strategies. We show how we can create different impressions of friendliness, rudeness, arousal and several other dimensions by varying the timing of the start of a turn with respect to the ending of the interlocutor's turn and by varying the strategy of ending or not ending a turn when overlap is detected.

Different turn-taking strategies of an agent influence the impression that people have of it. We recorded conversations of a human with an interviewing agent, controlled by a wizard and using a particular turn-taking strategy. A questionnaire with 27 semantic differential scales concerning personality, emotion, social skills and interviewing skills was used to capture these impressions. We show that it is possible to influence factors such as agreeableness, assertiveness, conversational skill and rapport by varying the agent's turn-taking strategy.

A number of parameters related to the position of the foot on the ground during normal level walking were analysed for a group of young and a group of old subjects, divided in two sub-groups each, according to sex. The analysis has shown asymmetries between the left and the right side of a number of subjects, differences between sexes and differences between age groups. Changes in the parameters of gait for the old subjects served the task of providing a larger base of support and a smaller loading of the hip musculature.

Stereotypes play a fundamental role in social judgment and interaction, particularly because they are socially shared across groups of people . Communication is key in perpetuating stereotypic beliefs (Beukeboom & Burgers, 2019;, as interpersonal and mass-media communication contribute to consensualization of (negative) social stereotypes . Biased language use in communication about categorized individuals plays an important role in this process. Variations in language features like abstraction

We cannot help but be intrigued by human behavior. This is in part what makes psychology so alluring-we want to know what motivates human behavior-particularly behavior that we fail to understand. For instance, between January and April of 2021, there have been at least six mass shootings in the United States, and in many of these cases, the motive of the attacker remains unclear (Atkins, 2021). While we do not intend to focus on such tragic incidents, these events nevertheless leave us saddened and confused, as well as determined to understand human motivation. Even the circumstances of our own lives are compelling for us. Consider the impact of the current pandemic and how Covid-19 has shaped our behaviors and mental health in ways that none of us could have predicted. For instance, the ongoing Stress in America survey conducted by the American Psychological Association (2021) indicates that many of us are continuing to struggle with the cascading impacts of the pandemic. The most recent survey findings indicate that a majority of adults are drinking more alcohol, gaining more weight, and sleeping more or less than they wanted since the pandemic (American Psychological Association, 2021, "Key Survey Findings" section). Of course, such survey data just tell us what we are doing-not necessarily the motivations behind our actions (other than a global behavioral response to the stress of the pandemic). In this era of misinformation and disinformation (Fisher, 2021), social media and its many iterations never seem to disappoint with example upon example of various hypotheses, theories, and explanations for such human behavior (even hyperbolic, inflammatory, and misleading explanations), whether this is an accounting of a horrific mass shooting or the reasons and causes behind our pandemic stress. The problem is that these "explanations" are often misleading or flat out wrong. Indeed, the New York Times recently reported that multiple popular social media posts continued to cite an unverified and invalid national health database as evidence for the claim that Covid-19 vaccines were responsible for as many deaths as the virus itself . This is where psychology can step in to fill the gap. Applied psychology in the form of rigorous methodology is supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff, helping us to discern facts or knowledge and separate these from opinion and misinformation regarding human behavior and the motivations behind such behavior. Our question for psychology, then, is a question for its methods. Can its methods really separate the wheat from the chaff, or stated a

Although strangers can assess certain traits of unacquainted others with moderate validity, overall validity is low. Differential validity across traits may be due to (a) the extent to which targets display valid cues or (b) the extent to which perceivers validly use cues. A functionalist perspective suggests that valid cue utilization should vary with how important the consequences of accurate trait assessment are. It was predicted from this perspective that perceivers would judge strangers' sociosexuality more accurately than 3 other traits--social potency, social closeness, and stress reaction. Perceivers viewed 1-min videotaped segments of targets being interviewed and rated them on the 4 traits. Ratings were correlated with target-reported trait measures. As predicted, perceivers' ratings of male sociosexuality agreed relatively well with self-reports. This effect was moderated by sex of target and sex of perceiver.

Some studies have revealed that most individuals tend to concentrate on others’ morality and intelligence at their social perception. The present study aimed to examine the accuracy of these social perceptions in zero acquaintance condition. Nine female students who had high, low or average moral identity/intelligence were considered as targets and the short video clips of their lectures about the same nonrelated subject were presented to other students to judge about them through three studies (total N: 208). The perceptions were full of above-than-chance inaccuracies which were repeated across the three studies. Considering the inaccurate positive account about many targets, accurate perceptions about highly moral/intelligent targets were explained by positive bias to targets than by actual accurate perception. Although beyond such bias, there were some little traces of accuracy particularly in intelligence, it seems that due to many inaccuracies especially about morality, such li...

Do accent biases observed half a century ago and 15 years ago still hold today in Britain? We provide an updated picture of national attitudes to accent labels by replicating and extending previous studies. Mean ratings and relative rankings of 38 accents for prestige and pleasantness by a large representative sample of the British population (N = 821) attest to a remarkably stable, long-standing hierarchy of accent status. We find little evidence of demotion of conservative prestige varieties or reranking of accents, although we do observe a slight improvement in lower rankings. We focus in detail on age and life stage, finding that most of the age patterns observed in earlier studies were in fact instances of age-grading (lifespan effects), not real-time change in attitude. The midlife phase of life corresponds to conservative shifts in the perception of global, migrant-heritage, and stigmatised varieties. Our findings add change in speech evaluation to the growing body of research on lifespan change in speech production. Finally, although effects of ethnicity, social class, regional self-and other-bias, and age remain firmly in place, earlier gender differences in respondent behaviour have more or less disappeared.

The article explores whether the traits representing the dimensions underlying the structure of facial and non‐facial impressions are similarly mapped in the face space. Two studies examine whether the trustworthiness‐by‐dominance and the warmth‐by‐competence two‐dimensional models overlap in face perception. In Study 1 (N = 200), we used a reverse‐correlation task to obtain classification images (CIs) reflecting how each dimension is mapped onto a face. Results show that the similarity between CIs was higher between warmth and trustworthiness than between competence and dominance. In Study 2 (N = 31) the evaluations of each CI on each social dimension show a higher dissociation between dominance and competence than between trustworthiness and warmth. These results, obtained at both perceptual and judgment levels, suggest that there is only a partial correspondence between the two models that seems to be driven by the relationship that the competence and dominance dimensions establi...

Investigação passada demonstrou que as pessoas realizam inferências espontâneas de traços (IET) a partir de comportamentos e que esses traços de personalidade ficam ligados em memória às faces dos actores. A investigação demonstrou também que os traços inferidos podem ficar associados a faces de comunicadores dos comportamentos, através de um processo de transferência espontânea de traço (TET). No presente estudo, substituimos as faces dos indivíduos por nomes, de forma a investigar em que medida os nomes dos actores e comunicadores (e.g., Carl Smith) também ficam associados em memória aos traços inferidos. Nestas condições, obtivemos dados que comprovam a ocorrência de IETs, mas não de TETs. Estes resultados mostram que a associação entre traços e comunicadores (TET) é altamente dependente da saliência visual do comunicador. Em contraste, as IET ocorrem mesmo quando o actor não é visualmente saliente. Os resultados são discutidos em termos dos processos subjacentes às IETs e TETs.

An extension of the DRM paradigm was used to study the impact of central traits in impression formation. Traits corresponding to the four clusters of the implicit theory of personality-intellectual, positive and negative; and social, positive and negative )-were used to develop lists containing several traits of one cluster and one central trait prototypical of the opposite cluster. Participants engaging in impression formation relative to participants engaging in memorization not only produced higher levels of false memories corresponding to the same cluster of the list traits but, under response time pressure at retrieval, also produced more false memories of the cluster corresponding to the central trait. We argue that the importance of central traits stems from their ability to activate their corresponding semantic space within a specialized associative memory structure underlying the implicit theory of personality.

We explored the possibility that the encoding flexibility processes postulated by Sherman and colleagues (1998) may also apply to intentional impression formation settings, even when cognitive resources are available to conceptually encode all of the behavioral information regardless of the relation of that information to the initial stereotypical expectancies. Three experiments offer evidence for the lower conceptual fluency for expectancy-incongruent behaviors, compared with congruent behaviors, as well as for the consequences of that difference for impression formation. Experiment 1 shows that incongruent behaviors are perceived as more difficult to understand in meaning. Experiment 2 links this lower conceptual fluency with a better discrimination of the specific trait implications of the behaviors. We further explore the role of conceptual encoding difficulty for developing personality impressions (Experiment 3). These studies reveal the implications of initial expectancies for the differential conceptual encoding of congruent and incongruent behaviors, even when the availability of cognitive resources is high, such as when forming an intentional impression about a person's personality. The link between this process and encoding the trait implications of behaviors may shed new light on impression formation processes and demand a revision of some of the assumptions that were made by the classical person memory model. We contend that behavior encoding in impression formation is likely to begin with default trait encoding but will be inhibited when the implications of the behavior conflict with previous trait expectancies (see also .

This research was funded by the Leonardo da Vinci training program. We thank Philip Woodgate, Matthew Cranwell, and Saheeda Mohamed-Kaleel for their help. We also thank Kimberly Quinn, Brandon Stewart, Frederico Marques, and Ludmila Nunes for their valuable comments on our research.

We extended the false memories paradigm to the study of impressions formation. traits most commonly used in describing person-targets were employed to identify the four clusters underlying the implicit theory of personality semantic structure (intellectual positive and negative; social positive and negative). Finally, we developed lists including semantic neighbors of the traits closest to the clusters' centroid and athematic (non-trait) words. participants were presented with these lists and instructed to either form an impression of a person described by those words or simply to memorize them. Impression formation relative to memory participants produced higher levels of false memories of lures corresponding to the same cluster of the list traits and the reverse pattern was found for a-thematic words. parallel results from a gist test suggest that forming impressions implies the activation of a specialized associative memory structure underlying the referred bi-dimensional implicit theory of personality (rosenberg, nelson, & vivekananthan, 1968).

The twofold retrieval by associative pathways (TRAP) model (L. proposes that two distinct modes of retrieval typically underlie recall and frequency estimation. The model accounts for the simultaneous occurrence of greater recall of incongruent information and higher frequency estimation of congruent information. Three experiments provided further tests of the TRAP model. Experiment 1 manipulated cognitive load (at encoding and at retrieval) and the selectivity of the retrieval goal. Under either high load or a selective retrieval goal, incongruent items ceased to be better recalled. Experiment 2 manipulated the accessibility of expectancy-congruent, -incongruent, or -neutral episodes and found corresponding effects in frequency estimates. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that providing part-list retrieval cues inhibits recall but increases frequency estimates. The TRAP model predicted these results.

More than twenty five years after the beginning of research on spontaneous trait inferences an intriguing paradox in the impression formation literature remains: if traits are spontaneously inferred, why aren't they used to organize behavioral information and thereby facilitate recall under memory instructions ? We hypothesized that organization by traits is more evident under impression formation goals because only in that case then are inferences sufficiently monitored to permit their use in organizing impressions. As a consequence, such monitored traits can then be used strategically as retrieval cues. Merging the main features of the Winter and Uleman and the Hamilton et al. experimental paradigms, Experiment 1 simultaneously replicated the main results of both studies. Using a new recognition paradigm, Experiments 2 and 3 further tested this inference monitoring hypothesis by showing that monitoring of trait inferences only occurs under particular processing goals, and is dependent on the availability of cognitive resources.

To investigate impression formation, researchers tend to rely on statements that describe a person’s behavior (e.g., “Alex ridicules people behind their backs”). These statements are presented to participants who then rate their impressions of the person. However, a corpus of behavior statements is costly to generate, and pre-existing corpora may be outdated and might not measure the dimension(s) of interest. The present study makes available a normed corpus of 160 contemporary behavior statements that were rated on 4 dimensions relevant to impression formation: morality, competence, informativeness, and believability. In addition, we show that the different dimensions are non-independent, exhibiting a range of linear and non-linear relationships, which may present a problem for past research. However, researchers interested in impression formation can control for these relationships (e.g., statistically) using the present corpus of behavior statements.

The effects of exposure to varying numbers of female role models on female career self-efficacy for perceived maledominated occupations is investigated. Female subjects (N = 304) completed a survey which included the short version of the Bern Sex-Role Inventory, and three occupational vignettes (accountant, architect, newspaper reporter) which were each followed by an intermediate self-efficacy scale. The first hypothesis states that female self-efficacy for a maledominated occupation will increase as they are exposed to an increasing number of female role models in the occupation. No support was found for this hypothesis. The second hypothesis states that females who are categorized as masculineand androgynous-typed females on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) will experienpe an increase in their selfefficacy levels with exposure to fewer female role models in a male-dominated occupation than will feminine-typed females so categorized on the BSRI. No support was found for this hypo...