Development and representation of personality impressions.

Abstract

A developmental model of impression formation was tested. Results indicated that the mental representation of personality impressions depends on the perceiver's degree of experience with the impression target. At low levels of experience, impressions consist primarily of stored behavioral exemplars. However, as experience increases, an abstract impression is formed that is subsequently stored and retrieved independently of the behaviors on which it was based. Experiment 2 demonstrated that impressions continue to evolve once they have become abstract and that behavioral exemplars affect judgments even when they are not directly retrieved for judgment purposes. These findings highlight the importance of applying dynamic approaches to impression-formation research.The way in which knowledge about social entities is represented in the mind has concerned social psychologists for decades. This concern is perhaps nowhere more evident than in research on impression formation-the study of how knowledge about another person is represented in memory and how its representation influences judgments about that person's characteristics (e.g., Anderson, 1981;Asch, 1946;Carlston & Skowronski, 1986;Hamilton, 1989;Klein & Loftus, 1990a;Klein, Loftus, & Schell, 1994;Srull & Wyer, 1989).Many recent models of impression formation have been influenced by the distinction between abstract and exemplarbased knowledge. For a given concept, abstract knowledge consists of a summary representation that has been abstracted from experience with multiple exemplars of the concept (e.g., Posner & Keele, 1968;Rosch, 1975), whereas exemplar knowledge consists of separate representations of the concept's known exemplars in memory (e.g., Brooks, 1978;Hintzman, 1986).This distinction is reflected in three types of impression-formation models. Abstraction models propose that an impression of a person consists of summary knowledge abstracted from experience with his or her behavior and that judgments about the person's characteristics are made by accessing the appropriate summary representation (e

Self-knowledge of an amnesic patient: Toward a neuropsychology of personality and social psychology.

“…Still, the evidence obtained in this case is consistent with the results from K.C., the amnesic patient studied by Tulving (1993) and with evidence from intact participants derived from several different paradigms (for reviews, see Kihlstrom & Klein, 1994;Klein & Loftus, 1993b). Moreover, this evidence about the self is consistent with conclusions derived from studies of person memory (e.g., Allen & Ebbesen, 1981;Anderson, 1989;Carlston, 1980;Klein & Loftus, 1990a;Sherman & Klein, 1994; for a recent review, see Kihlstrom & Hastie, in press). We believe that when considered as a whole, the evidence we have presented compels one to seriously entertain the possibility that semantic personal knowledge is represented in a manner that is independent of episodic personal knowledge.…”

Intergroup Bias in Group Judgment Processes: The Role of Behavioral Memories

“…In the initial stages of learning about a target, prior to the formation of stable impressions, judgments are often based on memory for specific episodes. However, once perceivers have developed and stored dispositional trait inferences, they are less likely to base social judgments on the activation of specific episodes (e.g., Hastie & Park, 1986;Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992;Sherman & Klein, 1994;Sherman, 1996). Instead, it appears that judgments rely on traitbased behavioral summaries that have either been formed on-line during encoding and stored (e.g., Hastie & Park, 1986;Klein et al, 1992;Sherman & Klein, 1994) or have been inferred from group membership (Sherman, 1996).…”

“…However, once perceivers have developed and stored dispositional trait inferences, they are less likely to base social judgments on the activation of specific episodes (e.g., Hastie & Park, 1986;Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992;Sherman & Klein, 1994;Sherman, 1996). Instead, it appears that judgments rely on traitbased behavioral summaries that have either been formed on-line during encoding and stored (e.g., Hastie & Park, 1986;Klein et al, 1992;Sherman & Klein, 1994) or have been inferred from group membership (Sherman, 1996). This pattern has been shown to generalize across many different social judgment domains, including self-judgments (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1993a;Klein et al, 1992), judgments about individual targets (e.g., Anderson & Hubert, 1963;Bargh & Thein, 1985;Fiske & Dyer, 1985;Hastie & Park, 1986;Klein et al, 1992;Park, 1986;Sherman & Klein, 1994), and, of greatest relevance, judgments about social groups (e.g., Sherman, 1996).…”

“…To examine the role of memories for specific behaviors in group judgments, we used a priming procedure that Klein and Loftus and their colleagues developed to assess the role of behaviors in judgments about the self and others (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1990, 1993a, 1993b, 1993cKlein, Loftus, & Burton, 1989;Klein et al, 1992;Schell, Klein, & Loftus, 1996;Sherman, 1996;Sherman & Klein, 1994). The procedure is based on the following reasoning: Suppose participants perform two tasks in succession.…”

Are Course Evaluations Subject to a Halo Effect?

“…The 'unfavourable' comments were scored separately but used the same numerical scale. This method of scoring took into account the order effect noted by Sherman and Klein, (1994);Wyer et al, (1994) and Swann and Gill, (1997) that the first thing said is the most important to the speaker.…”