Impression formation

The question of how we make judgements in a social context involves many issues apart from those considered in the previous chapter. In particular there is the question of how we perceive one another, on the basis of observed behaviour and the context in which that behaviour occurs. This question has been approached from a variety of different standpoints, some of which I shall mention only in passing. Notably, there is a large literature on how visual communication and non-verbal cues such as facial expression, posture and movement, can influence social interaction both in human beings (e.g. Rutter, 1984) and other primates (e.g. von Cranach and Vine, 1973).

Another important tradition, usually termed ‘impression-formation’ research, is based on the use of personality trait descriptions as stimulus material. The phrase ‘personality trait’ is not restricted to technical terms such as ‘neurotic’ or ‘introvert’, but includes any adjective that can be used as a description of someone's character – and ordinary language is full of these (Allport and Odbert, 1936). Anderson (1968b) for instance, lists 555 such adjectives, scaled in terms of ‘likeableness’.

Typically, studies in this tradition have presented subjects with lists of such adjectives that supposedly describe a single hypothetical person. Subjects are then required to make an overall rating of their composite impression of the target person, or to infer whether or not the target person possesses some other trait, not on the original list.