Initial Impressions of Others

Abstract

and Keywords"Initial impressions" join personality and social psychology like no other field of study -"personality" because impressions are about personalities and perceivers' personalities affect these impressions; and "social" because social cognitive processes influence impression formation and sociocultural contexts have major effects on impressions. How people describe others is reviewed: terms used, how descriptions reveal theories about others, and importance of types and categories. Research on social cognitive processes underlying these descriptions is highlighted: automatic and controlled attention, effects of primes and their dependence on contexts, acquisition of valence, spontaneous inferences, and interplay of automatic and control processes. Accuracy of initial impressions is examined, as are what accuracy means and motivated biases and distortions. Perceiver features and relations between targets and perceivers are reviewed. Frameworks for understanding explanations, as distinct from descriptions, are detailed: attribution theory, theory of mind, and simulation theory, including synchrony and the role of embodied cognition and metaphor.Who are you? How can we describe you? A colleague once asked if I (J. S. U.) knew what it is like to be a bat, referring to Nagel's (1974) famous essay on consciousness and the mind-body problem. I replied in all honesty, "I don't even know what it's like to be me." Where should I begin? What should I leave out, so the account takes less than a lifetime and responds to the question? How accurate are my impressions, and against what standards of accuracy? Is there one truth or many? These are the kinds of questions this chapter raises by noting how social and personality psychologists approach them in theory and in research. initial impressions. We also note recent work on distributed impressions, in cyberspace and in reputations. Relations to perceiver include power and psychological distance.Finally, we note recent work on explanations of others' behaviors, focusing on three frameworks: (a) attribution theory, (b) theory of mind, and (c) simulation theory, selfreference, metaphor, embodied cognition, and synchrony. Explanations are inherently interpersonal and are usually motivated and judgmental. They often depend on implicit theories. Lay Descriptions of OthersOur descriptions of others are a function of who they are, who we are, our familiarity with them and the goals of our descriptions, previous descriptions, and our culture. Traits are particularly prominent (Park, 1986). Their semantic and perceived relations to each other have been studied for over 50 years (Uleman & Kressel, 2013).

First impression effects in organizational psychology.

“…The existing heterogeneity in the treatment of time is necessary to conduct accurate first impression research in organizational settings. Despite its rich history of exploring first impression effects, the general psychology literature offers only limited insights into the wide variety of time frames of initial impressions across work contexts (Uleman & Saribay, 2018). Cataloging how each topic area, to date, has incorporated time in its study of first impressions shows the range of brief and, oxymoronically, lengthy initial impression effects in organizational research.…”

“…In the same vein, we suspect general psychology research can benefit from our framework by using it as a baseline to systematically develop future studies. Indeed, by recognizing and incorporating interacting parties' possible multiple motives as well as the varying time frames for first impression effects, our framework accounts for common limitations noted in the existing social cognition literature (Hall et al, 2019;Uleman & Saribay, 2018).…”

The development of spontaneous trait inferences about the actor and spontaneous trait transferences about the informant: Evidence from children aged 8–13 years

“…Such STIs about the actor and STTs about the informant are perhaps the most elemental forms of implicit impression formation (Lee, Shimizu, & Uleman, ; Uleman & Saribay, ), and are highly functional in adapting to a complex social environment. Specifically, we are immersed in information from social environment, and the cognitive resources of us are limited.…”

A comprehensive Meta-Analysis on Spontaneous Trait Inferences from Behavior - preprint

“…A wealth of studies has examined STIs, investigating their underlying mechanisms, process characteristics, moderators, and boundary conditions in studies with a multitude of experimental designs and in various samples across different countries. Several narrative reviews have summarized this literature (e.g., Hamilton & Stroessner, 2021;Moskowitz, 2005;Orghian et al, 2015;Uleman, 1987;Uleman, Newman, et al, 1996;Uleman et al, 2005Uleman et al, , 2008Uleman et al, , 2012Uleman & Saribay, 2018). Surprisingly, however, no quantitative review or systematic meta-analysis on STIs exists to date.…”