Week 2 - Impression Formation Flashcards
Stereotypes
“The essential cognitive function of stereotyping is to systematise and simplify information from the social environment in order to make sense of the world” (Tajfel, 1981, p.146)
• Categorization is a process whereby we make sense of the world around us by separating things into different classes or groups (McGarthy, 2018
Using Stereotypes
Stereotypes: widely shared, simplified, and evaluative beliefs about the personality traits and behaviours of a social group and its members
• One of the most salient characteristics in initial contact with someone is their group membership (e.g., sex, race, age)
• The process of categorisation activates a stereotype-consistent impression
• Any information which is not consistent with that stereotype may actually have difficulty being assimilated into the impression
• Slow to change
Affected by the social context
Categorising reduces cognitive load, exemplars within categories are treated in a similar way and we don’t require all the information about the exemplar category.
Prototype
A prototype is a mental representation of the best exemplar of the category.
• All other exemplars are compared to the prototype for ‘fitness’
• Once the category and the prototype are created they are difficult to change
• E.g. prototype for a ‘Mammal’ is usually a dog, cat, cow… you wouldn’t consider a whale or bat / ‘Susan’ wouldn’t be a prototype for builders
Impression Information
An important aspect of social cognition
Impressions are the basis for deciding how we feel about someone, how we interact with them, and how we talk about them to others (Schneider et al., 1979).
Mediation process
Within a social cognition framework, impression formation is seen as part of the mediating process between stimulus and response
• Stereotypes allow us to categorise a large group of people into specific groups
• Impression formation is therefore important at an interpersonal level (e.g., friends, strangers) and wider social level (e.g., job interviewing; jury service; political voting).
• So, how do we select and combine information about others to form impressions and make social judgements?
Asch – configural model (1946)
Asch noted we form impressions of ‘what other people are like’ quickly and easily - often on very little information.
• Participants were read a list of adjectives describing a target person, then asked to produce a short character sketch.
—- Content analysis
• showed participants had formed a unified impression from the list of discrete terms (not repetition of stimuli or synonyms).
o Energetic, assured, talkative, cold, ironical, persuasive.
o Description: “A very ambitious and talented person who would not let anyone, or anything stand in the way of achieving his goal. Wants his own way, he is determined not to give in, no matter what happens.”
o Participants had “gone beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1956)
— Impact of Different information
o Using same procedure, with an additional checklist of paired traits for easer assessment of impressions formed, Asch tested this with 2 groups of participants
o Group A: Intelligent, skilful, industrious, warm, determined, Practical, cautious.
o Group B: Intelligent, skilful, industrious, Cold, determined, Practical, cautious.
o was given Group A (warm) more positive than Group B (cold).
o Transformation - Variation of ‘warm-cold’ transformed impressions of the target person in terms of the other characteristics about which no direct information
— Centrality
o Asch repeated, replacing warm-cold with polite-blunt
o Much less effect than warm-cold, conlusing there where central traits ( central to the transformation of impressions, influencing the meaning of other traits) and peripheral traits (less important)
Further research criticized the stability of this distinction (Wishnet, 1960) but the idea of ‘central organising structure’ remains important. – most recent in social cognition, central traits are known as ‘schema
—Primacy
o Asch tested order effects by presenting 2 groups of participants with the same adjectives in reverse order
o Group A: Intelligent..to .. envious/ Group B: envious..to … intelligent
o Group A formed positive impressiong of the target than B – the ‘primary effect’ where earlier information sets up a direction for overall impression.
o Later research – evidence for ‘recency effects’ in impression formation – people tired, distracted but primary effects more common (John and Goethals, 1972)
Asch’s theory of impression formation
o Informing impressing we process info holistically – using ‘implicit theories of personality’ – generally these are socialy shared with cultures
o Some traits have a central role in integrating this information and organising the impression
o We integrate info into a holistic picture as it is presented as demonstrated (online- hastie and park 1986) with the primary effect.
Anderson 1963, 1981: cognitive algebra model
Rejected Asch’s theory and proposed that the social thinker forms impressions by “an algebraic linear integration of the weighted evaluation of ratings of trait information”
i.e., we attach some ‘rating’ to trait information and combine it in some way (add vs. average?) to reach an overall positive or negative impression.
Anderson tried to make explicit the evaluative process involved in impression formation
— Demonstration
- Anderson (1963) obtained normative information on 555 trait adjectives using 100 judges to assess ‘likeableness’ on 1-7 scale.
- Example: ‘reasonable’ = mean of 5.5; ‘persuasive’ = mean of 3.7
- Participants were presented with 6 of these trait adjectives and asked to consider them as equally important traits describing one person, then to rate that person on ‘likeableness’ (i.e., the measure of the overall impression formed).
Adding Vs averaging
o Knowing normative rating attached to stimulus traits, Anderson looked to see whether likeability ratings were produced by participants implicitly adding or averaging the trait information
o Results supported averaging model
Moderately positive information can weaken an impression formed by very positive information
— Problem with primacy?
o Like Asch, Anderson found a clear effect for order – earlier information was being given more weight in the averaging process
o How can this be explained if information is average? – Anderson proposed a simple attention effect – first traits are entirely unpredictable and attract more attention, later traits add comparatively less as attention decreases.
