Person memory: the role of traits, group stereotypes, and specific behaviors in the cognitive representation of persons.

Abstract

Subjects read a list of statements describing behaviors manifested by a target person who had previously been described by a set of personality trait adjectives. Some statements referred to the person by name, whereas others referred to him as a member of a stereotyped social group. The consistency of the behaviors with expectancies based on these general target characterizations was varied. Results of Experiment 1 showed that when the trait-adjective characterization of the target and the target's group membership had similar implications, the relative ease of recalling behaviors that were consistent and inconsistent with these implications depended on whether subjects had the opportunity to think more extensively about the information they received after all of it had been presented. Results of Experiment 2 showed that when a target's trait-adjective description and his group membership had dissimilar implications, subjects organized the person's behaviors around separate concepts, depending on whether the behavior statements referred to him by name or by group membership. Moreover, when subjects were told after they read the behaviors that the person described by trait adjectives was the same as the one referred to by group membership, they did not alter the cognitive representations they formed initially. These and other results suggested the existence of a priority system for engaging in goal-directed cognitive activity en route to forming a person impression, with lower priority activities giving way to higher priority ones when processing demands are high.