The major traits considered in forming impressions of others are called

Question 15 / 5 pointsThe major traits considered in forming impressions ofothers are calledA)social cognition.B)schemas.C)impression formation.D)central traits.

Question25 / 5pointsA tendency to over-attribute others' behavior todispositional causes and the correspondingminimization of the importance of situational causes isknown as

Get answer to your question and much more

Question35 / 5pointsMandy has decided that she has no control over theaversive stimuli she encounters at work and at homeday by day. Thus, she has given up trying to make herlife better. Psychologists would say Mandy's worldviewillustrates

Get answer to your question and much more

How do we form our impressions of other people?

Firstly, what do we base our impressions on - is it one's specific traits? Or rather, his/her overall image in our mind? Or may be all we care about is the physical appearance?
The timing is crucial too: is the first impression as important as it is believed to be? Can we alter it later on or does it stay unchanged?
These - and much more - questions I will be addressing in this post. Firstly, I will discuss the main Impression Formation theories. Then, I will come to the phenomena of Self-Fulfilling Prophesy (it is actually as exciting as it sounds!), and in the end I will touch upon the problem of the accuracy: are we, humans, actually any good at such basic social skill as forming opinions of others?

Asch's Theory of Impressions

Solomon Eliot Asch (1907-1996) was a pioneer of social psychology. He is also the author of the classic impressions theory. According to his Holistic (or Gestalt) model, impression formation is a dynamic process which involves all the different sources of perceptual information that is available for us. Thus, our interpretation of one's traits affect the way we perceive one's other traits too. 
However, not all of the traits have this ability to affect our perception of other traits. Asch divided human traits into central and peripheral traits.
     a) Central traits are the traits which impact our interpretation of other traits. They create the so-called 'Halo' effect - when the positive (central only!) traits elicit other positive impressions (for example, we tend to perceive attractive people as 'good'); same is true for negative (central) traits. Example of a central trait is being 'cold' or 'warm'. 

Evidence?
One of Asch's classic experiments was designed as follows: participants were given two sets of traits (for two imaginary people). These sets were identical (included traits such as 'determent', 'intelligent' etc.), however set A had 'cold' listed as one of the traits, while set B  had 'warm' instead. Later, participants were asked to rate these individuals' generosity, happiness, wisdom etc. What he found was that those who read a set B rated the person as wiser, happier, more generous etc. - in general, they had much more positive impression than those who had to rate a person A.

     b) Peripheral traits are the traits which do not have an impact on interpretation of other traits. An example could be 'polite' or 'blunt'. Indeed, when a similar experiment to the one discussed above was conducted with these words in the set, there was not much difference between the groups when they were asked to rate individuals A and B.

Recency and Primacy effects

Obviously, our impressions of others are based on the information that we know about them - in other words, on their traits. But is the timing of learning these traits also important, and is it the order in which we discover one's traits makes any difference to our impression of a person?
There are two concepts associated with this problem.
    1) Primacy effect states that the information that we learn first stays sway; in other words, the first impression is the strongest and is hard to change.
     2) Recency effect states that the most recent information stays sway; that is, our impression about a person is guided by our most recent interaction with them, or the trait which we learnt most recently.

    So which one is really at work?
    Luchins (1957) conducted an experiment with 4 groups of participants in order to find out which effect is stronger. 1st group read about extraversion; 2nd - about introversion. These were the control groups. Group 3 read information about extraversion first, and then - about introversion; group 4 - vice versa: about introversion first, and only then - about extraversion. Then, they were asked to judge a target on introversion/extraversion.
   Luchins found a strong primacy effect; those who read about extraversion first tended to perceive a target as more extraverted - and vice versa. Later research, however, suggested that recency effect is apparent if there is a delay between the first and the second sets of information.

    Overall, primacy effect is much more common. It has been explained in two different ways:
    a) Asch suggested that accommodating any new information about a person always means simply updating the first impression - which always stays there.
    b) Anderson (see below) argued that people simply tend to pay much more attention to the information that we encounter first in order to form an impression, thus assimilating it better.

Anderson's Algebraic Model

According to Anderson's model (1962, 1965), we form impressions in two stages. 
    1) During the first stage, we assign numeric values to each trait that we encounter in a person. These values can be either negative or positive. Thus, if we meet a person who appears to be attractive, intelligent and arrogant, in our mind we assign certain values to his/her traits: for example, +5 for attractiveness, +9 for intelligence and -8 for arrogance. 
   2) In the second stage, we decide on the person's overall likability based on their combined 'score'. So, for this person it would equal +5 + 9 - 8 = +6. However, as you might have noticed, some traits might be given more weight than others; therefore, we base our final impression not on the sum of the individual traits' values, but rather on their weighed average. In this case, 6/3 = +2 - so, the overall impression is positive but not far from neutral (zero).

Brewer's Dual Process Model

There has been a lot of criticism of the classical models of both Asch and Anderson. Firstly, the studies  seemed to be too artificial: in real life, we don't really encounter a person in a form of a list of traits. Another problem is that these models fail to account for such intuitively important factors in impression formation as stereotyping, motivation of a perceiver to form an accurate impression and cognitive resources of information.
Brewer's Dual Process Model does account for these factors. It looks as follows:

in which:
Identification is automatic assessment of basic features such as gender, age, race, perhaps occupation, etc. If a perceiver is not motivated to learn more about a person, the perception stops here. If, however, a person is relevant to a perceiver, the impression formation continues consciously.
Personalisation is evaluating a person as unique, such as their category membership is subordinate to their individual traits. It happens if a perceiver is motivated to form an accurate impression of a person, often if being involved on a personal level.
Categorisation is finding an appropriate category which would fit the person's observable traits; these could be 'feminist', 'student', etc. Stereotyping falls under this process. In most of other theories categorisation is an unconscious process, however Brewer suggests it is controlled.
Individuation is seeing a person as a special kind or subtype of their category in case they do not fit any 'default' categories that we might have ('She is one of those feminists who look feminine!').

The left part of the model (categorisation and individuation) is guided by top-down processing, in which we simply apply categories which are already formed to special cases; its right part (personalisation) however is guided by bottom-up processing, which means we form new category/impression based on new pieces of information.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

This phenomena is a powerful and quite striking one in social psychology, at least to me it is. It shows how our wrong expectations or earlier formed impressions of a person can alter this person's behaviour, making these expectations/impressions become true. 
Sounds confusing? Then consider the following example. You are going to meet a person for the first time, after having heard from someone that he is a very disagreeable person. Going to the meeting with such expectation, it is likely that you will be behaving accordingly: being cold, ready for the person to contradict you any time; frowning perhaps. This person will sense such attitude and is very likely to react appropriately by adjusting their behaviour - in this case, starting being confrontational. In this case you will probably think something like 'Aha! I was right, he is an unpleasant person indeed!'

Intuitively, it makes sense, but is there any real evidence?
Indeed, there is: an experiment conducted by Snyder, Tanke and Berscheid (1977). Two groups of male participants were given a picture of a woman they were about to have a phone conversation with. Group A got a picture of a very attractive woman, and group B - of a rather unattractive one. Then, independent listeners listened to phone conversations without knowing which men had which picture - and rated a woman's behaviour. What was found was that when men believed a woman to be attractive, BOTH them and listeners believed she was warmer, more confident etc.

It happens due to the mentioned earlier Halo effect. Attractive people are believed to have better social skills; also, people want to be liked by attractive people and therefore treat them in a warmer and more attentive way - which in turns alters these people's behaviour making them indeed more confident, animated, etc.

When is S-FP more likely to occur?
    1) When the person holding the wrong expectations controls the social encounter
    2) The target defers to this control (often in boss-staff relationships)
    3) Perceivers have no motivation to form an accurate impression
    4) Target either does not know or does not care about the wrong expectations or impressions held by others; in this case, he/she has no motivation to change them

Impression Accuracy

What are the major traits considered in forming impressions of others?

What is the process of forming impressions of others?

Which is most important in forming impressions?

What are the three types of impression formation?