Mental Representation of Persons, Psychology of

Abstract

Within social psychology, a major research focus is the processes by which perceivers form impressions of other persons, and the nature of the mental representations that they construct as a result. Mental representations or impressions of persons include many types of information, including the person's physical appearance, personality characteristics, and group memberships, as well as the perceiver's reactions to the person (e.g., like or dislike). These representations strongly influence the perceiver's judgments and actions toward the person. A half-century ago, person representations were assumed to consist of unorganized lists of traits, and a key focus of research was investigation of how traits combined to yield an overall evaluation. Since then, increasing emphasis has been given to behaviors as part of person representations, and research has focused on how people infer traits from behaviors, on the organization of impressions (such as associative links among traits and behaviors), and on the effects of general knowledge structures (such as group stereotypes) on impressions of individuals. Through the entire history of research on this topic, conceptions of mental representations of persons have closely tracked assumptions about the nature of mental representation more generally (i.e., general models of memory).