IMPRESSION FORMATION IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

IMPRESSION  FORMATION IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

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. That first opportunity is a very important one in  impression formation, the forming of the first knowledge a person has about another person. Impression formation includes assigning the  other person to a number of categories and drawing conclusions about what that person is likely to do—it’s really all about prediction.

  There is a  primacy effect  in impression formation: The first time people meet someone, they form an impression of that person, often based on physical appearance alone, that persists even though they may later have other contradictory information about that person (DeCoster & Claypool, 2004; Lorenzo et al., 2010; Luchins, 1957; Macrae & Quadflieg, 2010).

SOCIAL CATEGORISATION  One of the processes that occur when people meet someone  new is the assignment of that person to some kind of  category or group. This assignment is usually based on characteristics the new person has in common with other people or groups with whom the perceiver has had prior experience. This  social categorization is mostly automatic and occurs without conscious awareness of the process (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Vernon et al., 2014). Although this is a natural process (human beings are just born categorizers, sometimes it can cause problems.

STEREOTYPE, a belief that a set of characteristics is shared by all members of a particular social category (Fiske, 1998).  Stereotypes (although not always negative) are very limiting, causing people to misjudge what others are like and often to treat them differently as a result.

          Social categorization does have an important place in the perception of others. It allows people to access a great deal of information that can be useful about others, as well as helping  people remember and organize information about the characteristics of others (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). The way to avoid falling into the trap of negatively stereotyping someone is to be aware of existing stereotypes and apply a little critical thinking: “Okay,  so he’s a guy with a lot of piercings. That doesn’t mean that he’s overly aggressive—it just means he has a lot of piercings.”

IMPLICIT  PERSONALITY  THEORIES  The categories into which people place others are based on something called an  implicit personality theory. Implicit personality theories are sets of assumptions  that people have about how different types of people, personality traits, and  actions are all related and form in childhood (Dweck et al., 1995; Erdley & Dweck,  1993; Plaks et al., 2005).

       E.g.- idea that happy people are also friendly people and people who are quiet are shy.  Although these assumptions or beliefs are not necessarily true, they do serve the function of helping organize  schemas, or mental patterns that represent what a person believes about certain “types” of people.The schemas formed in this way can easily become stereotypes when people have limited experience with others who are different from them, especially in superficial ways such as skin color or other physical characteristics (Levy et al., 1998).

       There is a test designed to measure the implicit attitudes that make up one’s implicit personality theory, called the Implicit  Association Test, or IAT (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Greenwald et al., 1998). The test, taken by computer, measures the degree of association between  certain pairs of concepts.