Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 193

One of the early pioneers of research on social perception was Solomon Asch, who sought to determine how people form initial impressions of others. Asch (1946) suggested two possible processes by which first impressions are created. The first is an additive process, in which, upon encountering a person for the first time, the perceiver observes particular personality traits and combines them to produce an overall impression of the target. For instance, during your initial encounter with a person—we’ll call her Maria—you may notice that she is intelligent. You may also realize that Maria is funny, unfriendly, and belligerent. According to the additive model, your impression of Maria would essentially be a sum of each of these traits (as well as any others) that you think she possesses (impression = intelligent + funny + unfriendly + belligerent). This is an algebraic model because the individual traits are added together to form the whole (see Figure 5.1). The alternative hypothesis postulates that the perceivers form an overall impression (the “sum”) first and only later individualize that impression by isolating specific composite traits. This is the configural model, which means that we perceive the person as a psychological unity or configuration of characteristics and that this unity affects how we construe individual elements (see Figure 5.1).

Asch (1946) tested these two models in a series of twelve studies in which participants were exposed to varying sets of personal adjectives and subsequently asked to form overall impressions of the targets described by those adjectives. In the primary experiment, participants heard one of the two following lists, which differed only in their fourth term: (a) intelligent-skillful-industrious-warm-determined-practical-cautious, (b) intelligent-skillful-industrious-cold-determined-practical-cautious. Asch (1946) found that the overall person descriptions differed remarkably between the two groups. Simply substituting one word—cold for warm—significantly changed the general impression. For instance, a “warm” target person was likely to be seen as generous and wise, whereas a “cold” person was instead described as ungenerous and shrewd. Remember, only one adjective differed between the groups. Asch ran several variants on this study in which he examined how other combinations of adjectives affected overall impressions. In one version he substituted polite-blunt for warm-cold, and found much weaker effects on the overall impression than for warm-cold. From this and his remaining studies Asch derived two primary conclusions. First, impression formation seemed more in line with the configural, as opposed to algebraic, model. Second, certain traits—including warm-cold, appear to be more influential in the impression formation process. Variations in these central traits affected the overall impressions more than did variations in such peripheral traits, such as polite-blunt (Asch, 1946).

Several years later Harold Kelley (1950) conducted an interesting follow-up study in which he provided student participants with a written description of a guest lecturer in their economics class. The lecturer, previously unknown to the participants, was introduced as a “rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined” to about half of the participants and as a “very warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined” to the remaining participants. Participants were not aware of the fact that not all students received the same descriptions. After the guest delivered his lecture, participants were asked to evaluate him. Kelley (1950) wanted to determine how expectations of what a target would be like could affect the interpretation and evaluation of that target. Kelley found that participants given the expectation that the lecturer was warm evaluated the lecturer’s performance much more positively than did the participants in the cold condition, even though they witnessed the exact same lecture. Furthermore, the behavior of the students toward the lecturer depended on which descriptor was used: Participants in the warm condition were more likely to initiate interactions with him. Kelley’s research provided an important supplement to Asch’s, paving the way for subsequent, more fine-grained research on impression formation (Widmeyer & Loy, 1988).

Figure 5.1 How We Form Impressions

Source: Based on Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41(3), 258–290.