Importance Of Impression Formation

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HOW ARE IMPRESSIONS FORMED?

Impression is defined as an effect, feeling or image retained as a consequence of experience. Therefore impression formation in social psychology is referred to as the process by which individual pieces of information about another person are integrated to from a global impression of the individual e.g. how one person perceives another person.1.Consequently an individual’s impression of another should be similarly unified.2.In this essay there are two major theories that explain how this process of integration takes place which are:
• The Gestalt approach, which will view the information of a general impression as the sum of several interrelated impressions.
• The cognitive algebra approach of Information Integrated theory asserts that individual experiences are evaluated independently and combined with previous evaluations to form a constantly changing impression of a person.
3.According to a journal by Aditya Johri from The Department of Engineering educaton,Virgina Tech,United States titled ‘Computers in Human Behaviour’ it was said that Mead (1934) conceptualized humans as symbol processing life Forms and identified a fundamental need in humans to be able to make sense of their world in relations to others. To act towards, and with someone, we need to know that person, making impression formation one of the fundamental social processes. People form impressions of each other all the time, whether consciously or implicitly, and use the interpersonal knowledge acquired for a variety of purposes in their daily life (Uleman,1999). In an organizational Setting, such as a workplace, impressions take on an increasingly crucial role as organizations by definition require Interpersonal socialization. Whethe...

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...he target and the perceiver change impressions, the dynamicity of changes in team would require co-workers to constantly acquire new information about others and also shifts their motivation as dependencies among co-workers change with time. Therefore, a dynamic structure will equally affect information and motivation and it can be proposed that dynamic structure of teams will increase the need to revisit impressions requiring more effort to form impressions increasing the probability that coworkers will fall back to easily accessible categorical impressions thereby reducing individuated impressions.

References
1An important and related area to impression formation is the study of person perception, which refers to the process of observing behavior, making dispositional attributions, and then adjusting those inferences based on the information available.

Reference

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