Language and person cognition: effects of communicative set on trait attribution.

Abstract

People may be especially prone to construe an individual's behavior in terms of global traits when they anticipate verbal communication about that person. In a first experiment, subjects expecting to communicate their impressions of a target person generated a greater number of global trait descriptions and made a greater number of unqualified, mutually consistent trait attributions than did control subjects. Three further experiments tested the hypotheses that (a) the specifically verbal nature of the anticipated communication at least partly accounts for this effect and (b) expecting to receive a verbal communication may suffice to produce the effect as well. Both hypotheses received support: Subjects expecting either to transmit or to receive verbal impressions ascribed more traits to the target person, and were more influenced by their implicit personality theory in rating the target's dispositions, than subjects expecting to transmit impressions nonverbally .