Impression formation in social psychology refers to the processes by which different pieces of knowledge about another are combined into a global or summary impression. Social psychologist Solomon Asch is credited with the seminal research on impression formation and conducted research on how individuals integrate information about personality traits. Two major models have been proposed to explain how this process of integration takes place. The configural model suggests that people form cohesive impressions by integrating traits into a unified whole, adjusting individual traits to fit an overall context rather than evaluating each trait independently. According to this model, some traits are more schematic and serve as central traits to shape the overall impression. As an individual seeks to form a coherent and meaningful impression of another individual, previous impressions significantly influence the interpretation of subsequent information. In contrast, the algebraic model takes a more additive approach, forming impressions by separately evaluating each trait and then combining these evaluations into an overall summary. A related area to impression formation is the study of person perception, making causal attributions, and then adjusting those inferences based on the information available.
Methods Impression formation has traditionally been studied using three methods pioneered by Asch: free response, free association, and a check-list form. In addition, a fourth method based on a Likert scale with anchors such as "very favorable" and "very unfavorable", has also been used in recent research. A combination of some or all of these techniques is often employed to produce the most accurate assessment of impression formation. Beyond accuracy, the thin slices experiment examined the correlation between first impressions based on brief behavior exposures and more sustained judgments.
Free response Free response is an experimental method frequently used in impression formation research. The participant (or perceiver) is presented with a stimulus (usually a short vignette or a list of personality descriptors such as assured, talkative, cold, etc.) and then instructed to briefly sketch his or her impressions of the type of person described. This is a useful technique for gathering detailed and concrete evidence on the nature of the impression formed. However, the difficulty of accurately coding responses often necessitates the use of additional quantitative measures.
Free association Free association is another commonly used experimental method in which the perceiver creates a list of personality adjectives that immediately come to mind when asked to think about the type of person described by a particular set of descriptor adjectives.
Check-list A check-list consisting of assorted personality descriptors is often used to supplement free response or free association data and to compare group trends. After presenting character-qualities of an imagined individual, perceivers are instructed to select the character adjectives from a preset list that best describe the resulting impression. While this produces an easily quantifiable assessment of an impression, it forces participants' answers into a limited, and often extreme, response set. However, when used in conjunction with the above-mentioned techniques, check-list data provides useful information about the character of impressions.
Likert-type rating scales
With Likert scales, perceivers are responding to a presentation of discrete personality characteristics. Common presentation methods include lists of adjectives, photos or videos depicting a scene, or written scenarios. For example, a participant might be asked to answer the question "Would an honest (trait) person ever search for the owner of a lost package (behavior)?" by answering on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 "very unlikely" to 5 "very likely."
Thin slices experiments In the thin slices experiment, participants are asked to watch brief video clips depicting the target's behaviors, each lasting a few seconds. They need to then rate the target on various dimensions and provide an overall rating based on the impression from the clips.
Specific results Primacy-recency effect Asch stressed the important influence of an individual's initial impressions of a person's personality traits on the interpretation of all subsequent impressions. Asch argued that these early impressions often shaped or colored an individual's perception of other trait-related details. A considerable body of research exists supporting this hypothesis. For example, when individuals were asked to rate their impression of another person after being presented a list of words progressing from either low favorability to high favorability (L - H) or from high favorability to low favorability (H - L), strong primacy effects were found. In other words, impressions formed from initial descriptor adjectives persisted over time and influenced global impressions. In general, primacy can have three main effects: initial trait-information can be integrated into an individual's global impression of a person in a process of assimilation effects, it can lead to a durable impression against which other information is compared in a process of anchoring, and it can cause people to actively change their perception of others in a process of correction.
Valence Information inconsistent with a person's global impression of another individual is especially prominent in memory. The process of assimilation can lead to causal attributions of personality as this inconsistent information is integrated into the whole. This effect is especially influential when the behavior is perceived as negative. Consistent with negativity bias, negative behaviors are seen as more indicative of an individual's behavior in situations involving moral issues. Extreme negative behavior is also considered more predictive of personality traits than less extreme behavior. Additionally, negative stimuli, such as angry faces, are detected quicker, compared to non angry faces, in crowds and are deemed more salient. However, this reasoning can be flawed, as it can trigger a halo effect, where the influence of a single trait is overestimated, overshadowing other factors.
Central Traits The emotionality of certain personality traits can influence how subsequent traits are interpreted and ultimately the type of impression formed. For example, when participants are presented with the same list of personality traits, the impression they form can vary notably depending on whether a "warm" trait, as opposed to a "cold" trait is included. People are more likely to perceive an intelligent and warm individual as wise, whereas one described as intelligent and cold tends to be seen as calculating. These traits, which have a disproportionate influence on overall impressions, are referred to as central traits.
Nonverbal Behaviors Nonverbal behaviors exert a substantial amount of influence on impression formation. Nonverbal cues were used as the groundwork when participants were forming impressions of a speaker It was also seen that inconsistency between verbal and nonverbal cues prompted participants to rate the speaker to be less sincere, which further evidences the role of nonverbal behaviors in impression formation. The influence of nonverbal behaviors is also seen in professional settings such as the police force. Detectives with years of experience in their fields showed low accuracy rates when presented with the ask of identifying deception.
History Classic experiments In a classic experiment, Solomon Asch's principal theoretical concern revolved around understanding the mechanisms influencing a person's overall impression of others, principally trait centrality and trait valence of various personality characteristics. His research illustrated the influential roles of the primacy effect, valence, and causal attribution on the part of the individual. Based on the findings of ten experiments studying the effect of various personality adjectives on the resulting quality and character of impressions, several key principles of impression formation have been identified: Individuals have a natural inclination to make global dispositional inferences about the nature of another person's personality. Individuals expect observed behaviors to reflect stable personality traits. Individuals attempt to fit information about different traits and behaviors into a meaningful and coherent whole. Individuals attempt to explain and rationalize inconsistencies when the available information does not fit with the global perception.
Theoretical development In psychology Fritz Heider's writings on balance theory emphasized that liking or disliking a person depends on how the person is positively or negatively linked to other liked or disliked entities. Heider's later essay on social cognition, along with the development of "psycho-logic" by Robert P. Abelson and Milton J. Rosenberg, embedded evaluative processes in verbal descriptions of actions, with the verb of a descriptive sentence establishing the kind of linkage existing between the actor and object of the sentence.
Dwek and fellow researchers built on Heider's work in combination with Kelly Lowell's work, where he emphasized the stability of personality, which could be shaped through life events. They proposed the presence of individual differences among implicit beliefs about human attributes, which influence their assumptions and judgements of behaviors. The implicit theories they suggested were the entity and incremental mindsets. Entity theorists viewed dispositional traits as fixed and were more likely to attribute behaviors to dispositional factors, neglecting situational contexts. On the other hand, incremental theorists believed that personal characteristics were malleable and are more inclined to consider the context when assessing behaviors
Harry Gollob expanded Heider's insights with his subject-verb-object approach to social cognition, and he showed that evaluations of sentence subjects could be calculated with high precision from out-of-context evaluations of the subject, verb, and object, with part of the evaluative outcome coming from multiplicative interactions among the input evaluations. In a later work, Gollob and Betty Rossman extended the framework to predicting an actor's power and influence. Reid Hastie wrote that "Gollob's extension of the balance model to inferences concerning subject-verb-object sentences is the most important methodological and theoretical development of Heider's principle since its original statement.", p. 535
Gollob's regression equations for predicting impressions of sentence subjects consisted of weighted summations of out-of-context ratings of the subject, verb, and object, and of multiplicative interactions of the ratings. The equations essentially supported the cognitive algebra approach of Norman H. Anderson's Information integration theory. Anderson, however, initiated a heated technical exchange between himself and Gollob, in which Anderson argued that Gollob's use of the general linear model led to indeterminate theory because it could not completely account for any particular case in the set of cases used to estimate the models. The recondite exchange typified a continuing debate between proponents of contextualism who argue that impressions result from situationally specific influences (e.g., from semantics and nonverbal communication as well as affective factors), and modelers who follow the pragmatic maxim, seeking approximations revealing core mental processes. Another issue in using least-squares estimations is the compounding of measurement error problems with multiplicative variables.