Only 19.5% of participants ranked warm as the most important trait in determining their impression, whereas 55.3% ranked intelligent as the most important trait. between affective and informational negativity effects, Active learning exercises for teaching classic research on
impression formation Source: A Dictionary of Sociology Author(s): John Scott, Gordon Marshall. In Condition 1, warm and intelligent were mentioned about equally often, F < 1, with means of 0.23 and 0.22, respectively. Although there is not one unitary message to be taken from the work (which has been cited over 2,750 times), the message that seems to have most strongly resonated with present-day researchers concerns the primacy-of-warmth effect. Asch’s seminal research on “Forming Impressions of Personality” (1946) has widely been cited as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect, suggesting that warmth-related judgments have a stronger influence on impressions of personality than competence-related judgments (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Wojciszke, 2005). Your total impression is a series of … After removing capitals and punctuation, we used a sentiment dictionary (Wilson, Wiebe, & Hoffmann, 2005) to establish the average valence of all descriptions. Before discussing the latter point, we first provide a short overview of Asch’s main findings. Two Major Aspects of Impression Formation Concrete examples of behaviors they have performed that are consistent with a given trait ( exemplars, e.g. These have identified phenomena such as primacy effects and halo effects. After I had the total n for each cell, I ran a Chi-Squared test to determine if a significant difference in endorsement for generosity existed based on condition. impressions, Causal perceptions of intertrait relations: The glue that holds
The present research aims to critically examine the evidence that Asch’s (1946) research provides for the primacy-of-warmth effect. We found no evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1758 – 68. Erring on the conservative side, he underestimated the effect of central personality characteristics to affect perceptions of “restraint” and “importance.” In all other cases, his assertion that warmth and cold differentially change impression formation more strongly than politeness resonate with greater validity, reaffirmed by modern statistics. Although most early social psychologists did not rely on p-values to determine a finding’s significance, the rigor from current-day testing may help further validate Asch’s research. They were mostly beginners in psychology. perception: The stereotype content model and the BIAS map, G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program
Implications He is credited with the seminal research on impression formation and conducted research on how individuals integrate information about … mental processes, Instructional manipulation checks: Detecting satisficing to
Additive vs. In Condition 2, cold versus intelligent were mentioned equally often, F < 1, with means of 0.27 and 0.24, respectively. Social perception, impression formation, attribution, and social-cognitive biases are important and essential components to most college introductory social psychology courses [4]. We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their useful
Forming a Unified Impression: Procedure The plan followed in the experiments to be reported was to read to the sub-ject a number of discrete characteristics, said to belong to a person, with the instruction to describe the impression he formed. The subjects were all college students, most of whom were women. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target (person, object, scene, etc.) L., I. H., D. W., R. V. Materials, data, the preregistered proposal, and
© 2014 Hogrefe Publishing. impressions, Context effects in impression formation: Changes
Thus, although the ranking measure and use of warmth-related terms in open-ended descriptions do not provide evidence for a strong version of the primacy-of-warmth effect, the warm-cold dimension nevertheless had a stronger influence on the overall valence of impressions than the polite-blunt dimension did. One of the main problems in this area has been to determine whether people use additive or non-additive models to combine the information. Another part of impression-formation is primacy-recency, the tendency for first and last impressions to be the strongest. Social psychological laboratories have undergone considerable change since the publication of Asch’s “Forming Impressions of Personality” in 1946, leading to the inevitable demise of punch cards and slide carousels in favor of more advanced experimental equipment. 1. Looking at differences in “importance” in Experiment I, a significant difference existed between conditions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of seven trait lists (see Table 1 ). Fourth, the study proposal and materials were preregistered. Reading his 1946 paper for the first time, I could not help but wonder whether Asch’s conclusions about personality inference would hold under modern statistical tests. Solomon Asch may be best known in social psychology for his 1951 Conformity Studies in which he brought participants into a room with seven confederates—actors pretending to be other participants—and had them recount the length of a line. Finally, participants completed some demographic questions and were debriefed. Ever since Asch (1946) established many of the foundational principles of impression formation one being that impression formation is an organized process – Asch goes on to identify 3 others. The plan followed in the experiments to be reported was to read to the subject a number of discrete characteristics, said to belong to a person, with the instruction to describe the impression he formed. The results for this measure do not provide any evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect: In Study I, warmth was ranked highest by 6 out of 42 participants, the exact amount that could be expected by chance (given that there are seven options). In line with Asch’s predictions, the weight and meaning of warmth was not fixed, being relatively important in some contexts but not others. The present research suggests that Asch’s data do not provide evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect; if anything, competence seems more primary in his studies. Impression formation is defined as a procedure whereby specific pieces of information about someone else are combined to… The discrepancy leads one to wonder what about assigning participants to a category versus allowing them to describe the perceived individuals as “warm” or “cold” leads them to change their evaluation of a perceived person. To examine Asch’s findings with modern statistical rigor, I converted the reported percentages of subjects who had endorsed a characteristic back to the raw number of participants, based on the total N given at the top of each column in Table 2. Generally, Asch’s qualitatively-based conclusions hold true, with discrepancies only further validating his claims. experiments, Trait inferences, impression formation, and person memory:
An average valence index for each description was determined by first counting the number of positive and negative words, and then subtracting the number of negative words from the number of positive words. More specifically, cold was selected as most important trait by 30.0% of participants and as least important trait by 29.2% of participants: Participants seemed to have a polarized view on the importance of coldness, ranking it as important and as unimportant relatively frequently. In the open-ended measure, participants wrote down their general impression of the target. A Dictionary of Sociology Both measures suggest that warmth is not the primary determinant of perceivers’ impressions, and that intelligence (a competence-related trait) seems at least equally important. 153-163. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000179. Memory and impression formation Hamilton et al (1980): Subjects asked to either: • Memorize a list of traits, or • Form impression of an individual based on same traits Later given a surprise recall test Impression formation subjects remembered significantly more items than memory task subjects I.F. They also contain analyses suggesting that almost all participants formed unified impressions in which they went beyond the information given, creating elaborate narratives about things that were not included in the original trait lists they had been exposed to (such as other traits, occupations, and gender). supported by a grant of the Center for Open Science. to associationistic and dimensional models of person perception, Likableness ratings of 555 personality-trait words, Primacy effects in personality impression
Centrality, in his view, was a property multiple traits could possess simultaneously, a property determined by “the whole system of relations between traits” (p. 284). Averaged Impressions - Is our impression of an individual based on the sum of the values of known traits (Additive) or is it based on an average (sum of value of the traits divided by the number of known traits). I decided to embark on a (very nerdy) adventure exploring Asch’s data. Although Asch acknowledges that warmth plays an important role in impression formation, in his view, any trait can be central as well as peripheral. The Chi-Square Tests for Independence generally support Asch’s qualitative claims, upholding his conclusion that character traits affect impression formation differentially. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(5), 665–675. Asch primacy effect: Robust but not infallible, Asch on “Forming impressions of personality”:
These judgments are obtained by attending to nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions and body posture, as well as All traits mentioned by participants were rated by a separate group of participants (N = 33) on how warm and competent a person with that specific trait is (on a 7-point scale). and delayed evaluations of a warm/cold instructor, Bite-size science and its undesired side-effects, Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social
IMPRESSION FORMATION : When one person meets another for the first time, it is the first opportunity either person will have to make initial evaluations and judgments about the other. Changing polite to blunt, however, did not affect the valence of the impression (F < 1). person types together, The
Impression Formation - Psychology bibliographies - in Harvard style . Chi-Square values for all dependent variables, Experiments I-III, Table 2 was taken from the results of Experiments 1-3 published by Asch (1946) and used by me to test their statistical signficance, Cognition and Perception, Developmental Psychology, Education, General Psychology, Government and Policy, Health Psychology and ..., Social Psychology, emotion, film, kids, Media, non-verbal communication, psychology, Clinical Psychology, General Psychology, Social Psychology, american, Asian, clinical, collectivism, culture, depression, independence, interdependence, psychology, self-construal. effect, Thinking about people: Contributions of a typological alternative
These participants were excluded from this analysis. Beyond the methodological realm, Asch’s studies have also laid much of the groundwork for influential theories about person perception (e.g., attribution theory; Jones & Davis, 1965; the continuum model of impression formation; Fiske, Neuberg, Beattie, & Milberg, 1987). moral and immoral behavior, You’re getting warmer: Level of construal
5 Based on the literature by Cohen (1992) and power analysis with G*Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007), we had aimed to run 1,050 participants in total. Of 1,140 participants, 117 were removed because English was not their native language or because they failed to pass an instructional manipulation check (Oppenheimer, Meyvis, & Davidenko, 2009). The independence of evaluation and item information: Impression and recall order effects in behavior-based impression formation. Impression formation is a common element of human behaviour. More information on the interpretation of warmth in different conditions is available in the Additional Findings. Asch, 1946). These exploratory analyses include modern-day data-analytical approaches to quantify some of the ideas that Asch had about his data, but was unable to test. The results suggest that changing a trait from positive (e.g., warm) to negative (e.g., cold) made the overall impression more negative (negative traits of the pairs were chosen more frequently). A Brief History of Theory and Research on Impression Formation Automaticity and Control in Stereotyping and Prejudice: The Revolutionary Role of Social Cognition Across Three Decades of Research Attribution as a Gateway to Social Cognition The subsequent nine studies featured variations to this paradigm, introducing other traits, manipulating the order of traits, asking participants to give synonyms for elements of the trait lists, or asking for judgments on how the provided traits are related. formation, Further evidence for meaning change in impression
processes, Effect of closure on formation of
Moreover, participants’ descriptions of the target person centered on competence at least as much as on warmth, and a substantial amount of participants did not refer to warmth in their descriptions at all. Asch (1946) based his conclusions to a large extent on these open-ended responses, providing many anecdotes, but never systematically analyzing the data. Impression formation is … affects the impact of central traits on impression formation, The
For the trait-pair choice measure, participants chose which trait (out of a pair) was most applicable to the target. We will now discuss each of these measures in turn. for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth and
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. We further investigated the evidence for primacy-of-warmth in Conditions 1 and 2 by applying content analysis to the open-ended responses. We report all data
Importantly, the centrality of warm and cold in Conditions 1 and 2 was even more absent in Conditions 3, 4, and 5, in accordance with Asch’s hypothesis (1946) that the centrality of warmth is context-dependent. Primacy-of-warmth1 (e.g., Fiske et al., 2007; Wojciszke, 2005) entails that warmth has a primary role in impression formation, in the sense that warmth-related information has a stronger influence on impressions than competence-related information (Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworski, 1998). IMPRESSION FORMATION IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. Impression formation may be affected by (a) a person’s objective stimulus characteristics (b) the nature of stimuli and the context in which they are presented (c) perceiver variables (d) social interaction (Fidzani, 2002). One reason for Asch (1946) to conclude that warmth was central in impression formation was that the valence of impressions in his studies seemed to change dramatically when replacing warm by cold (as in Asch’s original Study I), but not when replacing polite by blunt (as in Asch’s original Study IV). comments on earlier drafts of this article. In light of these recent findings, it may seem unimportant that Asch’s data do not provide evidence for primacy-of-warmth, because, after all, the effect seems present in more modern studies. asymmetry, Understanding evaluation of faces on social
Although “Forming Impressions of Personality” has been regarded as a first demonstration of the primacy-of-warmth effect (e.g., Abele & Bruckmüller, 2011; Abele & Wojciszke, 2007; Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2008; Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005; Kervyn, Yzerbyt, & Judd, 2010; Richetin, Durante, Mari, Perugini, & Volpato, 2012; Vonk, 1994), it is unclear whether Asch’s original studies provide replicable evidence for the effect. Intelligent, not cold, seemed the primary determinant of participant’s impressions of personality. Popular AMA APA (6th edition) APA (7th edition) Chicago (17th edition, author-date) Harvard IEEE ISO 690 MHRA (3rd edition) MLA (8th edition) OSCOLA … The descriptions of 54% of participants in Condition 1 and 36% in Condition 2 did not include any reference to warmth, showing that a substantial amount of participants did not refer to the warm-cold dimension, but solely focused on competence. Asch concluded that individuals form dynamic impressions of others, based on more valenced or important character traits first with supporting or peripheral traits given lesser weight. A
Though this effect has been replicated repeatedly (e.g., Mensh & Wishner, 1947; Veness & Brierley, 1963; Semin, 1989), it may not provide the most stringent test of the primacy-of-warmth hypothesis, as changing any positive trait into a negative one is likely to influence the overall valence of the trait-list. Asch was curious how much, if at all, changing one word of the description would change the overall impression of the hypothetical person. These typological models failed to gain a strong foothold in the field: Instead, dimensional models became increasingly popular. A long tradition of (largely experimental) studies have investigated the impact of initial impressions. impression formation A social psychological term referring to the way in which strangers develop perceptions of each other. Then, all traits were repeated once (cf. Before demonstrating that normative pressure can lead people to lie, Asch was one of the foremost researchers on impression formation. The dictionary we used contains the valence (positive, negative, or neutral) of 8,220 words in the English language. Is warmth generally primary over competence in forming impressions, or is this effect limited to very specific circumstances? Asch’s qualitative methods led him to commit a Type II error, failing to recognize a difference between conditions when one existed. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(3), 380–391. In the present replication attempt, we aimed to critically examine the extent to which Asch’s seminal “Forming impressions of personality” (1946) provides evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. The authors declare no conflict-of-interest with the content of this article. Third, we randomly assigned participants to one of seven conditions to aid comparability of the studies (Asch ran the conditions in three separate studies). In line with Asch’s theorizing, changing warm to cold had a more pronounced influence on perceiver’s impressions than changing polite to blunt. exclusions, manipulations, and measures, and how we determined our sample sizes. If the warm-cold dimension was at the heart of participants’ impressions, warm and cold should be mentioned more often in their descriptions of the target person than any other trait from the presented lists. In Conditions 6 and 7 (original Study III), the same lists as in Conditions 1 and 2 were used with warm and cold replaced by polite and blunt. This limitation was acknowledged by Asch (1946), but seems to have been overlooked in many later references to his work. To pick up on these indirect warmth inferences, we generated an index of how warmth related the traits mentioned in the descriptions were. In Condition 2, perceivers saw the same trait-list as in Condition 1, except for warm (which was replaced by cold). According to Asch (1946), warm and cold should be central in Conditions 1 and 2 when accompanied by traits like intelligent, skillful, industrious, determined, practical, and cautious (original Study I), but not in Conditions 3–5 when accompanied by traits like obedient, weak, shallow, unambitious, and vain (original Study IV). Changing the manipulation trait from “warm”/”cold” to the “relatively peripheral” characteristics (p. 266) of “polite”/”blunt” altered the impression formation, as Asch predicted. formation, https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000179, Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005, Richetin, Durante, Mari, Perugini, & Volpato, 2012, Add this article to your Mendeley Library. Automatic vigilance: The attention-grabbing power of negative social information. Much like punch cards and slide carousels, the Gestalt-view on impression formation has slowly but surely gone out of fashion (partly because there were more simple explanations for Asch’s 1946 data, e.g., Anderson, 1981; Rosenberg, Nelson, & Vivekananthan, 1968; Wishner, 1960), though some of its premises have resonated in typological models of impression formation (e.g., Anderson & Sedikides, 1991; Sedikides & Anderson, 1994). The reader no doubt, while doing a basic course in psychology must have become familiar with the process of perception and some of the principles governing the same. In sum, the descriptions participants provided about the target person contained many traits that were not part of the originally presented trait lists, suggesting that participants went beyond the information given and made inferences about the target person’s other traits. Subtracting 82 from 90, I found 8 individuals did not endorse “generous” in the “Warm” condition. Thus, our interpretation of one's traits affect the way we perceive one's other traits too. Most contemporary impression formation work seeks to emphasize cognitive process and representations. My Table 2. To determine which words in participants’ descriptions were traits, we used Anderson’s list of personality traits (Anderson, 1968); only words included in this list were considered in the present analysis.6 We generated a warmth index for 188 traits in this way: First, we calculated scores for warmth- and competence-relatedness by reverting the ratings to absolute values of the scores centered around the midpoint of the scale (e.g., the ratings one and seven would both be reverted to three, as both scores have a distance of three points to the midpoint of the scale). Many studies suggest that warmth plays an important role in impression formation (for a review, see Fiske et al., 2007; Wojciszke, 2005), but we wonder if Asch has befittingly been cited as the progenitor of this effect. impression formation in social psychology courses. Thus, warm was central in Asch’s Study I when accompanied by traits like intelligent, skillful, industrious, determined, practical, and cautious, but was peripheral in Asch’s Study IV when accompanied by traits like obedient, weak, shallow, unambitious, and vain. I then proceeded to subtract the number of subjects who had endorsed a characteristic from the total N, to arrive at the number of subjects who did not endorse a trait for each condition. B. After providing informed consent, participants were instructed that they would see several traits on a computer screen, all of which belonged to the same person. 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