Asch on "Forming Impressions of Personality": Further Evidence

Abstract

In a recent study of the processes involved in the forming of impressions of personality, Asch concluded that this formation "is an organized process, that charactenstics are perceived in their dynamic relations, that certain qualities are discovered, leading to the distinction between them and peripheral qualities, that relations of harmony and contradiction are observed To know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure "Â s Asch has pointed out, there have been several theories regarding the formation of impressions of personality 1 The formation of impressions of personality is the result of a simple summation of independent traits 2 Some traits are always of a central quahty, and these affect peripheral traits by making them consistent with the central trait 3 Impressions are formed of the whole personality by the perception and organization of the dynamic interrelations of the traits of a given individualThe first theory is no longer accepted by psychologists The emphasis in our textbooks on the "halo effect" in personality judgments indicates the extent to which the second theory is currently held The amount of evidence Asch has marshaled against this theory and for the third theory requires a re-examination of the entire field of personality ratings Objections may be raised against his sampling, however, particularly with respect to the factors of sex and geographical representation Therefore, a repetition of some salient parts of his study, with a different sample, would be important Two of the ten experiments in Asch's series were selected for •The authors wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to Professor A R. Gilhland, Northwestern University, for his assistance in carrying out this investigation, to Professor S E Asch, The New School for Social Research, for many helpful suggestions, and to Professor W A Hunt, Northwestern Umversity, for editorial comment 'S E Asch, Forming impressions of personality / abnorm soc Psychol, 1946, 41. 258-290

Reanalysis of "impressions of personality."

“…8) and by Bruner and Tagiuri (1954) and need no further comment here. Asch's direct findings seem quite reliable and have been confirmed in several studies (e.g., Mensh & Wishner, 1947).…”

Pervasiveness of Dominant General Factors in Organizational Measurement

“…This would give rise to the halo effect. His work was clarified by Mensh and Wishner (1947), who showed that context had an effect on ratings and thus on the halo effect. Cooper (1981) noted that the magnitudes of the intercategory correlations are due to both true intercorrelations between categories and illusory theories held by raters regarding the extent to which categories are related to one another.…”

Forming Impressions of Personality

“…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). 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.…”

“…Consequently, the interpretation of these data was heavily contested by his contemporaries (e.g., Gollin, 1954;Luchins, 1948). Because replications of Asch's research did not include systematic analysis of open-ended responses either (e.g., Mensh & Wishner, 1947;Semin, 1989;Veness & Brierley, 1963), as yet it is unclear to what extent they provide evidence for primacyof-warmth (or for effects that were the actual focus of Asch's paper; more information on those effects is available in our Additional Findings).…”