Impression formation
A related area to impression formation is the study of person perception, making causal attributions, and then adjusting those inferences based on the information available.
Beyond accuracy, the thin slices experiment examined the correlation between first impressions based on brief behavior exposures and more sustained judgments.
The participant (or perceiver) is presented with a stimulus (usually a short vignette or a list of personality descriptors such as assured, talkative, cold, etc.)
[5] After presenting character-qualities of an imagined individual, perceivers are instructed to select the character adjectives from a preset list that best describe the resulting impression.
While this produces an easily quantifiable assessment of an impression, it forces participants' answers into a limited, and often extreme, response set.
Common presentation methods include lists of adjectives, photos or videos depicting a scene, or written scenarios.
[4][7][8][9] For example, a participant might be asked to answer the question "Would an honest (trait) person ever search for the owner of a lost package (behavior)?"
"[10] In the thin slices experiment, participants are asked to watch brief video clips depicting the target’s behaviors, each lasting a few seconds.
[22] Reid Hastie wrote that "Gollob's extension of the balance model to inferences concerning subject-verb-object sentences is the most important methodological and theoretical development of Heider's principle since its original statement.
The recondite exchange typified a continuing debate between proponents of contextualism who argue that impressions result from situationally specific influences (e.g., from semantics and nonverbal communication as well as affective factors), and modelers who follow the pragmatic maxim, seeking approximations revealing core mental processes.
[28] In sociology David R. Heise relabeled Gollob's framework from subject-verb-object to actor-behavior-object in order to allow for impression formation from perceived events as well as from verbal stimuli, and showed that actions produce impressions of behaviors and objects as well as of actors on all three dimensions of Charles E. Osgood's semantic differential—Evaluation, Potency, and Activity.
"By entering a situation in which he is given a face to maintain, a person takes on the responsibility of standing guard over the flow of events as they pass before him.
[35] Ratings of 515 action descriptions by American respondents yielded estimations of a statistical model consisting of nine impression-formation equations, predicting outcome Evaluation, Potency, and Activity of actor, behavior, and object from pre-event ratings of the evaluation, potency, and activity of actor, behavior, and object.
Third-order interactions included a balance effect in which actors received a boost in evaluation if two or none of the elements in the action were negative, otherwise a decrement.
Impression-formation research[39] indicates that self-directed actions reduce the positivity of actors on the Evaluation, Potency, and Activity dimensions.
Early work on impression formation used action sentences like, "The kind man praises communists," and "Bill helped the corrupt senator," assuming that modifier-noun combinations amalgamate into a functional unit.
[48] Impressions can be made from facial appearance alone and assessments on attributes such as nice, strong, and smart based on variations of the targets’ face.
The results show that subtle facial traits have meaningful consequences on impressions, which is true even for young children of 3 years old.
The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been shown to play a key role in evaluating others' traits and intentions, particularly in the context of social judgments.
The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is crucial for interpreting social cues, such as facial expressions and body language.
