Discussing Impression Formation

Impression formation and stereotypes

First impressions are considered very important. It is very common to hear people talk about the importance of giving a good first impression because that very first moment in which people see or meet someone new, shows them the kind of person they are most likely to be.

How is personality impressions formed? Do first impressions have a much greater impact on judgements than subsequent impressions?

How first impressions are formed has been a subject of interest by many researchers in the area of psychology.

Past research in this subject suggests that primacy effects exist in impression formation.

Solomon Asch (1946) conducted a study to see how people form impressions. Participants were given a set of traits describing a person. The list included Warm, Cold, Polite or blunt (among others). Participants rated the Generosity, Happiness, sociability and popularity (among other words) of the new person.

One explanation was that we form impressions using some kind of gestalt or whole picture, with each piece of information influencing the others. An intelligent & warm person generates a positive impression an intelligent & cold person generates a negative impression. Asch’s experiments on formations of personality impression suggested that when adjectives describing a person are presented in sequence, the first adjectives have more impact than the later ones.

The same words used to describe a person could produce very different ratings of that person depending on the order in which the words were presented. When adjectives with more positive meaning were given first followed by words with less positive meaning, the participants tended to rate that person more positively, but when t...

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... saying what they think or believe.

Taking all this information into consideration, the present study sought to investigate the effects occupational stereotypes have on forming impressions and personality judgements. The aim of the study was to see how different groups of participant rated a photograph of an unknown individual on things such as likability, wealth, education and status. This was done by using three separate groups, the same face was used on each image but the job title was changed for each test group.

The experimental hypothesis states that the participants would rate the lower class job titles lower on likeability and financial status and the higher class job titles higher on wealth and likeability. The hypothesis being that the job title of solicitor would be rated higher in all aspects of likeability than the job title of Dustbin man.