Implicit Personality Theory Research Articles

Children's Implicit Personality Theories as Predictors of Their Social Judgments

Children's Implicit Personality Theories as Predictors of Their Social Judgments

Nature and consequences of halo error: A critical analysis.

The definition of halo error that dominated researchers' thinking for most of this century implied that (a) halo error was common; (b) it was a rater error, with true and illusory components; (c) it led to inflated correlations among rating dimensions and was due to the influence of a general evaluation on specific judgments; and (d) it had negative consequences and should be avoided or removed. We review research showing that all of the major elements of this conception of halo are either wrong or problematic. Because of unresolved confounds of true and illusory halo and the often unclear consequences of halo errors, we suggest a moratorium on the use of halo indices as dependent measures in applied research. We suggest specific directions for future research on halo that take into account the context in which judgments are formed and ratings are obtained and that more clearly distinguish between actual halo errors and the apparent halo effect. When an individual is rated on multiple performance dimensions or attributes, the rater's overall impression or evaluation is thought to strongly influence ratings of specific attributes (Cooper, 1981 b), a phenomenon that is referred to as halo error (Thorndike, 1920). Discussions of halo error are most frequently encountered in the context of evaluative judgment (e.g., in interviews and performance appraisals), but similar phenomena have been noted in research on illusory correlation (Chapman & Chapman, 1969), implicit personality theory (Lay & Jackson, 1969), and interpersonal judgments (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

Some instantiations of the informational negativity effect: Positive‐negative asymmetry in category breadth and in estimated meaning similarity of trait adjectives

AbstractStarting from the assumption that people direct more attention to the objective, non‐evaluative, aspects of undesirable behaviours than of equally evaluatively‐intense desirable ones and attach more weight to the defining descriptive features of undesirable traits than of desirable ones, we predicted and demonstrated, with samples of Dutch adjectives, that, on the average, undesirable trait adjectives, as compared to desirable ones, had a lower category breadth and a higher discriminative value (Study 1). Undesirable trait adjectives were also estimated as less similar in meaning and as less likely to co‐occur in the same person, and were less strongly intercorrelated when used for memory‐based self‐ratings (Study 2). These positive‐negative asymmetries tended to hold for all traits whether they belonged to the self‐profitability dimension or to the other‐profitability dimension, and did not depend on the evaluative intensity of the traits. Alternative interpretations of these asymmetries and the implications of these asymmetries for personality assessment and for research on implicit personality theory and on the factorial structure of rating correlations are discussed.

暗黙の性格理論と人物のカテゴリー化について 概念研究と対人認知研究との融合

In a theory-based concept model, the theory is often treated as implicit. In order to specify the conditions under which people prefer to construct categories of family resemblance, thereby explicating such an implicit theory, two experiments of people-sorting tasks were conducted. The first experiment was based on the paradigm of defining family resemblance in terms of independent sets of matching and mismatching values of personality traits. The second explored the idea that inter-property relationships rather than independent personality traits served to organize categories of people. In both studies, participants with low cognitive complexity persisted in sorting people on the basis of family resemblance, while those with high cognitive complexity continued to sort them along a single dimension. The results indicated that choice of sorting strategies, such as family resemblance or dimension, was related to an aspect of the person's implicit personality theory, namely cognitive complexity. Therefore, it was argued, a theory-based concept model and implicit personality theory were closely related.

Implicit personality theory and the five-factor model.

The Big Five have not only been identified in ratings of knowledgeable informants, but also in ratings of strangers, in co-occurrence likelihood ratings of traits, in semantic similarity ratings of trait pairs, and in prototypicality ratings of acts for traits. This article describes the shared and distinctive characteristics of correlations among trait ratings and implicit personality theory and reviews studies that compare the structure of memory-based ratings and of on-line behavior counts. Three hypotheses suggested in the literature to account for these correlations are delineated and discussed: an accurate reflection hypothesis, a distortion hypothesis, and an overlap hypothesis. It is concluded that the distortion hypothesis, has been discredited and that an overlap model best accounts for the available evidence. This implies that traits are real and accurately perceived, provided that the judges have the necessary information.

College Students Use Implicit Personality Theory Instead of Safer Sex1

Many college students engage in high levels of unsafe sexual behavior that puts them at risk for HIV infection. To better understand the dynamics underlying college students' unsafe behavior, focus group discussions were conducted with 308 students (146 men and 162 women). The results showed that, instead of consistently using condoms, many college students use implicit personality theories to judge the riskiness of potential sexual partners. Specifically, partners whom college students know and like are not perceived to be risky, even if what students know about these individuals is irrelevant to HIV status. The students determine the riskiness of partners they do not know well based on superficial characteristics that are also generally unrelated to HIV status. Therefore, AIDS prevention interventions for college students must expose the ineffectiveness of the students' use of implicit personality theories to determine potential partners' riskiness, and the “know your partner” safer sex guideline should be abandoned.

Judgements by health professionals of personal characteristics of people with a visible physical disability

Discussion within rehabilitation literature suggests that visible disability is a cue which influences impressions that others form of a person. These impressions extend to include personality and social characteristics that have no necessary relationship with the disability. Evidence of such “spread” of judgement has emerged in studies with health professionals and raises concern for the quality and appropriateness of their interactions with clients with disabilities. This article incorporates the feature of disability within the wider context of implicit personality theory by exploring its effects on impression formation in conjunction with the effects of gender and manner of behaviour. A sample of 636 trainee and practising health professionals made Semantic Differential ratings of a job applicant observed in a videotaped interview. Twelve parallel videos were produced in which disability (use of a wheelchair), gender, and manner of behaviour (shy-neutral-brash) of the applicant were varied. Analyses of variance revealed significant main effects for each independent variable. Interaction effects were limited. Further study of Semantic Differential ratings indicated that respondents devalued the disabled applicants, with presence of wheelchair influencing judgements about social and psychological adjustment and about general competence and capability. Reasons posited for these findings include the nature of health professional-client relationship and occupation-related experience. A disability awareness package is described which is aimed at health professionals and service providers and which is designed to address negative attitudes by providing accurate information and personal contact with people with disabilities.

Requesting information to form an impression: The influence of valence and confirmatory status

The present study examines the impact of the valence and the confirmatory status of trait information on impression formation by giving subjects an opportunity to play an active role in their reception of information. In two experiments subjects indicated who, out of a series of candidates, corresponded to an a priori personality profile. These profiles were either positive or negative in tone. Also, whereas some profiles comprised univalent evidence (all personality traits were either positive or negative), others included mixed evidence (most traits were either positive or negative together with a few that were opposite). On the basis of earlier research on dispositional inference using behavioral instances as the cues for judgment, we expected the positive traits to carry less weight than the negative ones. Thus, subjects were predicted to require a greater number of positive traits than negative ones before making a decision. Subjects were also expected to request more traits when these confirmed rather than disconfirmed their expectations. The obtained pattern of data strongly supports our hypotheses. As a whole, the data indicate the existence of a “necessity-oriented” decision rule, as well as the presence of strong constraints in people's implicit theories of personality. Implications are drawn for further research on stereotypes and on lay epistemology.

The representation of self in multidimensional cognitive space

A number of studies point to the efficiency with which people process self-relevant trait information. The derivative models of self-cognition account for many judgement latency and memory effects. These models tend to limit themselves, however, by neglecting the cognitive representation of the traits themselves. In contrast, research on implicit personality theory has focused on the cognitive representation of trait information, but has not always addressed the relationship between self and the judged traits. These two research domains were linked in an effort to specify the cognitive representation of self. A method for locating individuals and traits within the same spatial representation was developed and validated in two studies. In Study 1, subjects exhibited superior recall for traits located closest to self. In Study 2, subjects rapidly selected which of two traits better or least described self. 'Better' judgements were faster with increasing closeness to self of selected traits whereas 'least' judgements were faster with increasing closeness to self of non-selected traits, supporting the view of self as fixed anchor in self-relevant decision making. Taken as a whole, these two studies provided further evidence for the self as an evaluative organization of knowledge.

Children’s personality judgements of dominant and submissive teachers

Videorecordings of seven adults, presented as teachers, were shown to 187 8 to 13-year-old children. The adults played a dominant or a submissive role. The children’s task was to judge the adults on 19 five-point scales, each of which measured a psychological attribute or a teacher quality. The results shown that 1) the judgements had a clear factorial structure; 2) the role played by the targets and the age of the children significantly influenced the judgements: in their dominant role more teacher qualities and more positive characteristics were ascribed to the targets; the younger children produced more positive judgements than the older ones. It was concluded that short observations of behaviour may be sufficient for children to ascribe psychological characteristics to unfamiliar people and that these ascriptions seem to be based on implicit personality theories.

Implicit Personality Theory and Social Judgment: Effects of Familiarity with a Target Person.

The hypothesis tested in this study is that judgments of the personality of unfamiliar target persons correspond better with the subject's Implicit Personality Theory (IPT) than judgments of the personality of familiar persons do. Each subject's IPT was individually assessed and represented using multidimensional scaling. Then judgments were obtained about three familiar and three unfamiliar target persons. The correspondence between a subject's IPT and his/her judgments about each target person was measured by fitting these judgments to the subject's IPT structure. This correspondence measure was significantly better for unfamiliar than for familiar targets. This result confirmed the hypothesis.

Thinking about people: Contributions of a typological alternative to associationistic and dimensional models of person perception.

The associationistic view of person perception states that people are perceived in terms of trait covariations. The dimensional view maintains that others are perceived by means of a limited number of dimensions. In contrast, the typological view is that others are perceived in terms of person types, and traits within a given person type have a unique interactive relation. In Experiment l, associationistic, dimensional, and typological representations of implicit personality theories were empirically derived. The derived stimuli were used in Experiment 2, which examined the effects of person type membership on impression priming and perceived trait belongingness, controlling for associationistic and dimensional factors. As expected, results validated the unique contribution of a typological approach to person perception. Implications of the present findings for the implicit personality theory, stereotype, and person memory literatures are discussed. People constitute important categories of objects. It is of no surprise, then, that thinking about people is such a pervasive phenomenon. We routinely form impressions of other people's personalities, make predictions about their behavior, wonder about their intentions, and evaluate their performance outcomes. In this article, we are concerned with the issue of how we think about, perceive, or cognitively represent other people.

What is beautiful is good, but…: A meta-analytic review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype.

This review demonstrates that the physical attractiveness stereotype established by studies of person perception is not as strong or general as suggested by the often-used summary phrase what is beautiful is good. Although subjects in these studies ascribed more favorable personality traits and more successful life outcomes to attractive than unattractive targets, the average magnitude of this beauty-is-good effect was moderate, and the strength of the effect varied considerably from study to study Consistent with our implicit personality theory framework, a substantial portion of this variation was explained by the specific content of the inferences that subjects were asked to make: The differences in subjects* perception of attractive and unattractive targets were largest for indexes of social competence; intermediate for potency, adjustment, and intellectual competence; and near zero for integrity and concern for others. The strength of the physical attractiveness stereotype also varied as a function of other attributes of the studies, including the presence of individuating information.

Influence of Age, Body Type, Fashion, and Garment Type on Women's Professional Image

The purpose of this research was to extend implicit personality theory in an attempt to explain further the inferred relationship between a person's physical characteristics and personal traits. Specifically, this study examined business and professional men's and women's perceptions of the professional image of women as a function of the women's physical characteristics, the type of garment worn, and the fashion detail of the garment. Participants (N = 207) viewed six black‐and‐white photographs of females wearing either suits or dresses. Re sponses to six 7‐point, unipolar adjective checklists were then summed to obtain a score indicating the degree of professional image perceived. A 3 (age of model) × 3 (body type of model) × 3 (fashion detail) incomplete randomized block design was used. Men's and women's responses to models in suits and dresses were analyzed separately using analysis of variance. Results indicate that (a) suits convey a stronger professional image than dresses for women of any age or body type; (b) when judged by business and professional men, older women convey a stronger professional image than younger women when wearing dresses; (c) gar ments with innovative fashion detail contribute to a weaker professional image than garments with contemporary or classic fashion detail; and (d) thin women convey a stronger professional image than larger women.

Exploring implicit personality theories with indigenous or imported constructs: The Chinese case.

Exploring implicit personality theories with indigenous or imported constructs: The Chinese case.

Exploring implicit personality theories with indigenous or imported constructs: The Chinese case.

This study is concerned with the relation between indigenous and imported constructs of personality perception. A pool of Chinese personality descriptors was used by Chinese Ss to rate a variety of target persons. These same Ss then rated the same target persons using the (translated) personality descriptions first isolated by Tupes and Christal (1961) from Americans. Five factors of personality perception were then derived from both the emic Chinese descriptors and the imported American descriptors. The interrelations among these factors were examined to address the basic question of how adequately the factors gleaned from these foreign materials represented Chinese perceptual space. Of the 5 Chinese factors, 4 could be adequately explained by varying combinations of the 5 imported factors. Furthermore, there was a 1-to-1 relation of imported to indigenous factors for only 2 of the 5 indigenous factors, whereas the others were multiply determined. The implications of these results are discussed with respect to the widespread use of foreign instrumentation and the models of man that may or may not be constructed in consequence.

Theory of Personality, Illness, and Cure Found in the Writings of Agnes Sanford and those Acknowledging Her Influence

The implicit theory of personality, illness, and cure in the sometimes vague and inconsistent writings of the practitioners of “inner healing” is extracted and made more systematic. The writings of Agnes Sanford and those acknowledging her influence are abstracted.

Personality Theory or Spiritual Discernment? A Reaction to Clark

The author reacts to Clark's (1989) preceding article. Clark is found to have been too generous in attributing to the writings of the inner healers an implicit personality theory. These writings are better categorized as description or spiritual discernment.

A Study on Implicit Personality Theory Relating to Figure and Appearance

A Study on Implicit Personality Theory Relating to Figure and Appearance

A Classroom Exercise in Impression Formation

This classroom exercise provides students with an opportunity to examine aspects of their own impression-formation processes. The data generated can be used to stimulate discussion about the origins of implicit personality theories, person prototypes, and the accuracy of first impressions.