When you're hot, you're hot! Warm-cold effects in first impressions of persons and teaching effectiveness.

Abstract

We examined the effects of Kelley's manipulation on first impressions of persons and teaching ability. A stimulus person, posing as a visiting professor, gave a lecture to 240 university students. Before the stimulus person appeared, half of the subjects received information that he was a person, whereas the other half was told that he was a cold person. In turn, half of each of these groups was informed that he was a professor of physical education and the other half that he was a professor of social psychology. A 2 (warm/ cold condition) x 2 (discipline of the stimulus-person) x 2 (subjects' sex) multivariate analysis of variance revealed that (a) subjects who were led to believe that the stimulus person was perceived him as a more effective teacher and as less unpleasant, more sociable, less irritable, less ruthless, more humorous, less formal, and more humane than did subjects who were told that he was a cold person; and (b) neither the disciplinary status of the stimulus person nor the sex of the subjects had an effect on subjects' perception of the lecturer. Results were discussed in regard to halo, context, and status effects. Forty years ago, Asch (1946) demonstrated that he could alter subjects' descriptions of the personality of a hypothetical person by simply interchanging adjectives representing central qualities such as warm and He also found, however, that the inclusion of terms representing peripheral qualities such as polite or blunt did not significantly affect subjects' impressions of the perceived personality of a hypothetical person. Kelley (1950) extended Asch's experimental work by showing that the warm/cold manipulation influenced subjects' impressions of a real person whom they actually encountered. Although the stimulus person, a man posing as a guest lecturer, was introduced in a neutral manner, subjects later received one of two kinds of notes about him. In one note, the stimulus person was described as being rather warm, whereas in the other he was described as being rather cold. After the random distribution of this preinformation, the stimulus person appeared and led a 20-min discussion. The verbal interaction of the subjects with the instructor was recorded. After each discussion, subjects were asked to write free descriptions of the stimulus person and to rate his personality on 15 predetermined scales. Like Asch, Kelley discovered that the attribution of a central quality such as warmth significantly influenced subjects' total impression of a person. For example, he found that subjects who were told that the stimulus person was consistently gave him more favorable ratings on several personal attributes than did