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In Chapter 3, we described some biases in human cognition, including the availability and representativeness heuristics. Here we’ll revisit the topic of cognitive biases in the context of person perception. One set of biases are called implicit personality theories or lay theories about the kinds of person characteristics that are typically found together (Asch, 1946; Bruner & Taiguri, 1954; Christensen, Drewsen, & Maaløe, 2014; Sedikides & Anderson, 1994). Implicit personality theories are, like schemas, knowledge structures that influence how we construe our social world (Dunning, 2003; Yeager et al., 2014). One of the most prevalent implicit personality theories in the United States is “what is beautiful is good,” which suggests that people who are physically attractive also possess a number of other positive characteristics, including higher intelligence, happier marriages, more occupational success, and overall happiness (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Wheeler & Kim, 1997). Recent research demonstrates that a person’s implicit theories about the covariation of particular pairs of traits in other people is partly a function of whether the perceiver believes he or she possesses the paired traits. People project patterns of traits that they detect in themselves onto other people (See Research Box 5.1) (Critcher & Dunning, 2009; Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker, 2006). For instance, if you see yourself as idealistic and confident that you can control your future, then you’ll likely think that, in general, people who are idealistic also believe they control their future (Critcher & Dunning, 2009).

Schemas, such as implicit personality theories, are learned and, like many other aspects of our psychology, are culture-based (Hoffman, Lau, & Johnson, 1986). Evidence for this stems from a study of memory for culture-based implicit personality theories embedded in the English and Chinese languages. Hoffman and colleagues (1986) provided participants with four personality sketches reflecting distinct character types. Two of the character types—artistic and liberal—were rooted in the English language, whereas the other two—shi gu and shen cang bu lou—were Chinese-based. Each character was given a name, but the personality type label was not provided to respondents. There were three groups of participants: One group spoke only English, a second group was English Chinese bilingual and read and responded to the materials in English, and the third group was also English Chinese bilingual but read and responded in Chinese. Five days after reading the four personality sketches, participants returned to the lab and wrote down their impressions of the four characters in either English or Chinese. One of the critical dependent measures was the number of character traits that respondents listed in their free responses that were not included in the original descriptions but were consistent with the corresponding character type and the description originally provided.

The researchers expected that individuals who completed the study in English would “fill in” more descriptors that were consistent with the two English labels—artistic and liberal—than they would for the Chinese ones—shi gu and shen cang bu lou—whereas the Chinese-language respondents would do the opposite. This is in fact what happened. English-language respondents clearly relied on implicit personality theories of artists and liberals and embellished those in stereotype-consistent ways. However, given that they were unaware of the two Chinese personality types, they did not embellish those in stereotype-consistent ways. The Chinese language respondents showed the opposite pattern. The bottom line here is that implicit personality theories are at least partially culture-based (Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997; Chiu, Morris, Hong, & Menon, 2000; Hoffman et al., 1986).

Social psychologist Robert Rosenthal’s research on self-fulfilling prophecies found that the expectations of his laboratory assistants about the abilities of mice affected how well the mice navigated a maze.

©iStockphoto.com/lculig.

Why do implicit theories matter? Well, they, along with other schemas, act as expectations that people have about particular persons or situations and affect how we think about, plan for, and behave around those persons or in those situations. If, for example, you expect a professor to have specific personality characteristics or tendencies, then you are likely to act accordingly. Remember Kelley’s (1950) study of the warm-cold variable? There, expectations about what the guest lecturer was like significantly impacted how the students responded to him. But expectations may do more than simply alter the behavior of the perceiver—they can, as a result, also shape the behavior of the target. When a perceiver has inaccurate expectations about a target but acts as if they were true, he can shape the target’s behavior to be consistent with those expectations (See Figure 5.2). Essentially, behavior that the target persons would otherwise not have engaged in is produced by the perceiver, thereby fulfilling or realizing those inaccurate expectations. Such a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when an initially inaccurate expectation leads to behaviors that cause that expectation to come true (Jussim & Harber, 2005; Madon, Willard, Guyll, & Scherr, 2011; Merton, 1948; Wurm, Warner, Ziegelmann, Wolff, & Schüz, 2013). The sociologist Robert K. Merton (1948) first described this phenomenon with reference to runs on U.S. banks in the 1930s, during which thousands of customers decided to withdraw their bank savings because they believed that their banks would be closing. In reality, the banks were not endangered, but many were forced to close because of the actions of the customers. A false construal of a situation led to behavior that changed reality and thereby confirmed that construal.

One of the most famous demonstrations of the self-fulfilling prophecy was conducted by the social psychologist Robert Rosenthal in 1964 in a San Francisco elementary school. Rosenthal administered an intelligence test to all of the students in 18 classrooms and told the teachers that the test predicted which students would show “intellectual blooming” during the following academic year (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). Rosenthal randomly designated 20% of the students as very likely to go through an intellectual growth spurt and indicated to the teachers (but not the students or their parents) which ones fell into this category. At the end of the school year, the students took the test again; remarkably, those students “predicted” to intellectually improve did so rather significantly in comparison to the remaining 80%. Given that the designation was done randomly, the only difference between the experimental and control groups was in the minds of the teachers. The inference is clear: False teacher expectations led teachers to treat the experimental students in ways that made those expectations come true—such as giving them more attention and individual feedback (Jussim & Harber, 2005; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

Figure 5.2 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Making Your Misperceptions Come True

Self-fulfilling prophecies have been found in many other contexts, including in a study of maze learning in rats (Rosenthal & Fode, 1963), where naïve experimenters were told that certain randomly designated rats should learn mazes faster than others. Although there were in fact no pre-treatment differences between the groups, the experimental rats did in fact learn faster, presumably because they were treated differently by the lab assistants. Rosenthal’s startling findings led to research that has shown similar effects both in and outside the laboratory (Jussim, Robustelli, & Cain, 2009; Madon et al., 2011). One particularly disconcerting study found that mothers who hold false beliefs—in this case, overestimates—about the likelihood that their adolescent children will drink alcohol, behaved in such a way so as to actually increase the alcohol consumption of those children (Madon et al., 2008). Fortunately, field research has shown that self-fulfilling prophecies can be used to improve substance abuse treatment. For instance, parental positive predictions about the effectiveness of treatment of adolescent drug abuse that involved parents were more likely to be fulfilled when the adolescents were assigned to parent-involved treatment versus when they were assigned to a no parental-involvement treatment (Madon et al., 2013).

Self-fulfilling prophecies have been shown to be operative in the realm of physical attraction; people not only interact differently with targets they deem attractive, but they can also elicit relevant behaviors from those targets, which can then affect how other individuals perceive the targets. For example, in one study, male undergraduates engaged in a get-acquainted conversation with women by phone after having seen a photo of their conversational partner (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977). One group of men talked with someone they believed was attractive, whereas the other group believed their partner was unattractive. The photos were of course randomly assigned, and the men never saw a photo of their actual conversational partner. The conversations were recorded, and later, when a different group of people who did not see photos of the women listened to just the women’s end of the conversation, they rated the attractive women as warmer and more socially adept than the women previously deemed unattractive. Thus, the initial male discussion partners who thought their female partner was attractive behaved in ways that elicited more socially desirable behavior from those female partners than did the males who believed that their partner was unattractive. The upshot is that even false expectations about the attractiveness of another person can produce behavior consistent with those expectations! Later, in Chapter 10 on stereotypes, we will encounter related research on the effects of stereotype-based expectations on the behavior of stereotyped persons.

Implicit Personality Theory: Lay or unscientific theory about the kinds of person characteristics that are typically found together