Overview
Impression formation is the process of building an overall judgement of another person from fragments of information such as appearance, manner of speech or a few traits and actions. Since Solomon Asch's 1946 studies, social psychology has repeatedly shown that people do not simply add up pieces of information but organise them into a meaningful whole, and that the order in which information arrives strongly shapes the impression.
Asch's impression formation experiments
- Central traits: Asch presented the list "intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm, determined, practical, cautious" and an identical list with "cold" in place of "warm". Changing one word sharply altered ratings of other traits such as generosity, humour and happiness, whereas swapping traits like "polite/blunt" had little effect; Asch called these peripheral traits.
- Order effects: when a list such as "intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious" was given in reverse order, the version beginning with positive traits produced a far more favourable impression. This is the primacy effect.
- Field replication: Harold Kelley (1950) introduced a guest lecturer to real classes as either "rather warm" or "rather cold". After the same lecture, students given the "warm" description rated him more favourably and took part more in discussion.
Primacy and recency
Abraham Luchins had participants read two paragraphs about "Jim", one describing extraverted and one introverted behaviour, in different orders, and found that the paragraph read first dominated the overall impression. When a time gap or another task separated the two, however, later information could weigh more, a recency effect. Norman Anderson treated impressions as a weighted average of information and explained, within information integration theory, why earlier items receive larger weights.
- Attention decrement: people attend closely to early information and process later items less carefully.
- Interpretive frame: early information becomes a schema that colours how ambiguous later information is read, linking to confirmation bias.
- Consistency seeking: information that contradicts an existing impression tends to be ignored or treated as an exception, related to the motive to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Faces and brief exposures
Willis and Todorov (2006) found that after seeing an unfamiliar face for only 100 milliseconds, judgements of attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence and aggressiveness correlated highly with judgements made without time limits. Longer exposure increased confidence but did not change the judgements much. The role of non-verbal cues such as appearance, expression and voice connects with discussions of Mehrabian's rule, but fast judgements are not necessarily accurate.
Applications and limits
- Interviews and evaluation: impressions from the first few minutes of an interview easily dominate the overall rating; structured interviews and scoring rubrics reduce this bias.
- Halo effect: one positive trait raises ratings of unrelated traits; Asch interpreted this as an attempt to grasp a person as a unified whole.
- Changing first impressions: consistent, repeated contrary information and enough contact can revise a first impression. Studies also suggest the primacy effect weakens when judges suspend judgement and are motivated to be accurate.
References
- Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41(3), 258–290.
- Kelley, H. H. (1950). The warm-cold variable in first impressions of persons. Journal of Personality, 18(4), 431–439.
- Luchins, A. S. (1957). Primacy-recency in impression formation. In C. I. Hovland (Ed.), The Order of Presentation in Persuasion (pp. 33–61). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Anderson, N. H. (1965). Primacy effects in personality impression formation using a generalized order effect paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2(1), 1–9.
- Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598.