Initiative Taking as a Determinant of Role-Reciprocal Organization

Abstract

The study explores the evolution of subjects' constructions of role-reciprocal interactions in a story about two ambiguous characters meeting in a singles bar. Patterns of role-reciprocal organization reveal a strong initial tendency to interpret initiative-taking as male behavior. This tendency persists at the expense of intra-role consistency. Microgenetic change in the temporal context provided by story transitions reveals a pattern of increasingly integrative organization, characterized by growth in balanced decentering between perspectives. The suggestion is offered that the development of social knowledge can be understood according to rules shared by the development of other forms of knowledge, whether at the level of ontogenesis or microgenesis, Asch suggested that we tend to organize bits of information about a person into cohesive, stable units. These units or person percepts are not unlike the units formed when we perceive "things." [1] Two principles emerged from the early person perception literature:1. the notion that there are some central, densely organized traits around which impressions are formed; and 2. the notion that the order in which information is received will influence the way in which impressions are formed.Typically, there is a strong primacy effect when impressions are formed from serially presented information.Much of the early work on person perception focused on the person as the appropriate unit of study and impression formation as the dependent variable. 277