There is not one singular implicit personality theory utilized by all; rather, each individual approaches the task of impression formation in his or her own unique way.
These components are of particular interest to social psychologists because they have the potential to give insight into what impression one person will form of another.
His research, dating back to the mid-1940s, provided a substantial amount of the initial data explaining factors that affect impression formation.
Many of the ideas produced from Asch's experiments are still relevant to the study of impression formation, and have played a significant role in establishing a foundation for modern implicit personality theory research.
[7][8] The strongest evidence for the implicitness of impression formation comes from observed "savings effects" when trying to learn another person's traits.
The participants exhibited a true savings effect, which suggested that they had gained implicit trait information from the descriptive stimuli.
This theory does not deal exclusively with traits, but rather describes a general worldview a person takes in life.
People who exhibit entity theory tend to believe that traits are fixed and stable over time and across situations.
Moreover, entity theorists tend to make assumptions about others' traits based on a limited sample of their behaviors.
They also place less significance on traits when interpreting another person's actions, focusing rather on other types of mediators that may be influencing their behavior.
[14] In the very first study he performed, Asch found that participants asked to form an impression of a person who was "intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm, determined, practical, and cautious" formed significantly different impressions than participants asked to describe a person who was "intelligent, skillful, industrious, cold, determined, practical, and cautious".
[16] A possible explanation for the observer's tendency to form more positive impressions of people who are similar to him involves the theory of intergroup bias.
The idea of intergroup bias suggests that people tend to judge members of their own group more favorably than nonmembers.
[25] Mood can play an influential role in impression formation by affecting the way the primacy effect is used when making judgments.
[26] This is most likely due to the selective priming of information associated with the current mood state, which causes mood-congruent biases in impression formation.
In addition to the aforementioned self-based heuristic, another one of the most common misuses of implicit personality theory is when observers believe two traits are more highly correlated than they are in reality.
On the other hand, a logical error fallacy is made when observers make judgments about trait relationships based on correlations they believe make sense logically, instead of forming these connections based on observations of real-life trait relationships.