Spontaneous trait inference and construal level theory: Psychological distance increases nonconscious trait thinking

Can psychological distance affect how much perceivers form spontaneous trait inferences (STI) from others’ behaviors? On the basis of construal level theory (CLT) which posits that distant (vs. near) entities are represented more in terms of their abstract, global, and decontextualized features, we predicted that perceived distance would increase the tendency for perceivers to draw spontaneous trait inferences from behavioral information about actors. In two experiments, participants learned about people who were perceived as being distant or proximal to the self, and STI formation was subsequently assessed. We found that perceivers were more likely to form STIs about distant vs. near actors from the same behavioral information. These findings generalized across two distance dimensions: space and time. In addition, we found that priming individuals to adopt a high-level (vs. low-level) construal mindset also resulted in increased STI (Experiment 3). In sum, psychological distance facilitates STI formation, and this occurs via high-level construal of actors and their behaviors.     

Person perception by active versus passive perceivers

Person perception research is dominated by studies of passive perceivers who exert no control over the information they receive. In contrast, perceivers in everyday life can often actively choose the type and quantity of information they receive. In this study, active and yoked passive perceivers formed impressions of individuals based on information from Facebook. Compared to active perceivers, passive perceivers reported greater confidence and ease in their judgments. Passive perceivers exhibited greater confidence (though not greater accuracy) with increased information, but active perceivers did not show this effect, placing a boundary condition on past research. Passive perceivers also liked targets more than active perceivers, a finding that is not explained by valence-dependant sampling by active participants, or by misattribution of fluency or greater sensitivity among passive participants. These provocative findings highlight the need to account for active and interactive processes in person perception rather than continuing to focus on passive perceivers.     

How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility

Body movements both express and influence how people feel and think. Conceptualizations of this bidirectional influence assume that movement-concept associations can be innate or learned, although evidence for learned associations remained ambiguous. Providing a conservative test of learned movement-concept associations, two studies investigate the influence of culture-specific body movements, which involve an arbitrary relationship between movements and associated concepts. Paralleling the influence of hostility primes, extending the middle finger influenced the interpretation of ambiguously aggressive behaviors as hostile, but did not influence unrelated trait judgments (Study 1). Paralleling the effects of global evaluative primes, upward extension of the thumb resulted in more positive evaluations of the same target along all trait dimensions and higher liking of the target (Study 2).     

Keeping up impressions: Inferential rules for impression change across the Big Five

Not all first impressions have equal longevity. Which kinds of impression have the greatest mobility—downward and upward—over the course of acquaintanceships? In this article, we propose an inferential account of impression maintenance across Big Five trait domains. With data from field and laboratory studies, we provide evidence that positive impressions of agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), and emotional stability (ES) are especially vulnerable to small amounts of contrary evidence, whereas positive first impressions of extraversion (E) and openness (O) are more resistant to contrary information. Impressions of E and O demonstrated minimal susceptibility to negativity effects in a longitudinal study of college roommate impressions (Study 1), in a study of perceivers’ implicit theories about different trait domains (Study 2), and in an experimental study of manipulated impression change (Study 3).     

From ugly duckling to swan?: Japanese and American beliefs about the stability and origins of traits

Two studies compared the development of beliefs about the stability and origins of physical and psychological traits in Japan and the United States in three age groups: 5–6-year-olds, 8–10-year-olds, and college students. The youngest children in both cultures were the most optimistic about negative traits changing in a positive direction over development and being maintained over the aging period. The belief that individual differences in traits are inborn increased with age, and in all age groups, this belief was related to predictions of greater trait stability. In both cultures, all ages believed positive traits would be maintained over development. In addition to developmental similarities across cultures, cultural variations, consistent with the hypothesis that interdependent cultures have a more incremental view of traits, were present. Japanese participants were more optimistic than American participants about negative traits changing towards the positive and were more likely to attribute differences in trait expression to effort.     

The face inhibition effect: Social contrast or motor competition?

This research examined the relative importance of encoding and retrieval contexts to the demonstration of concreteness effects in memory. Predictions from relational-distinctive and dual-code positions were evaluated. In the first two experiments, concreteness and recall task (free recall or cued recall) were manipulated following a relational semantic orienting task. The results showed an interaction between concreteness and recall type only when distinctive information could be accessed both within and between pairs. The third experiment showed that concreteness effects appeared under a relational, non-semantic orienting task. In the fourth experiment, we reexamined the magnitude of the concreteness effect following semantic versus non-semantic tasks and relational versus item-specific processing. Overall, the findings were inconsistent with both dual code theory and distinctiverelational view accounts of concreteness effects. An alternative "bidirectionality hypothesis" is suggested.     

Getting to know you: From view-dependent to view-invariant repetition priming for unfamiliar faces

Recent research suggests that repetition priming (RP) for unfamiliar faces is highly view dependent and is eliminated when the viewpoint of target faces changes between study and test. The current research examined whether increased familiarity with novel faces from a single viewpoint at study would support RP from an alternative viewpoint at test. Participants passively viewed novel face images from a single viewpoint at study (i.e., either front or three-quarters), with half of the images seen once and half seen on five occasions. During a sex classification task at test, participants were faster to respond to face images seen from the same view as that at study than they were to previously unseen distractor faces for both single exposure faces and faces seen on five occasions (i.e., standard RP). When, however, face images at test were shown from a different viewpoint from that at study, RP only occurred for faces viewed on five occasions.     

Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50 ms

People have proved adept at categorizing others into social categories, at least when the categorical distinction is perceptually obvious (e.g., age, race, or gender). There remain many social groups whose boundaries are less clear, however. The current work therefore tested judgments of an ambiguous social category (male sexual orientation) from faces shown for durations between 33 ms and 10,000 ms. The sexual orientation of faces presented for 50 ms, 100 ms, 6500 ms, 10,000 ms, and at a self-paced rate (averaging 1500 ms), was categorized at above-chance levels with no decrease in accuracy for briefer exposures. Previous work showing impression formation at similar speeds relied on consensus to determine the validity of judgments. The present results extend these findings by providing a criterion for judgmental accuracy—actual group membership.     

I know you're me, but who am I? Perspective taking and seeing the other in the self

Research examining the consequences of perspective-taking on cognition suggests that through perceiver–target overlap, perspective-taking can lead to greater valuing of targets, greater helping of targets, and a reduction in stereotyping of targets and the groups to which they belong. Research has also begun to focus more closely on the ways perceivers come to think and act like targets. This research, however evocative, is not conclusive. The current studies set out to provide firmer support. Reported here, two studies found that perspective-taking influences perceiver–target overlap, which mediates changes in self-concept (ratings of the self on researcher-related attributes and beliefs after taking the perspective of a researcher in Study 1 and attitudes toward African Americans after taking the perspective of a racist in Study 2). In the same studies, overlap simultaneously mediated valuing of the targets (target ratings on positive attributes in Study 1 and liking for the target in Study 2).     

Let there be no mistake! On assessment mode and the transference effect in social perception

We examined the possibility that assessment regulatory mode orientation affects the tendency to exhibit transference effects in social perception. Based on a social cognitive methodological paradigm devised by Andersen and colleagues [e.g., Andersen, Glassman, Chen, & Cole, 1996], we find that the transference effect is more pronounced when individuals’ (chronic) assessment orientation is low (vs. high). These results suggest that transference is more likely to occur when less attention is directed towards the target of perception.     

Lost in the crowd: Entitative group membership reduces mind attribution

This research examined how and why group membership diminishes the attribution of mind to individuals. We found that mind attribution was inversely related to the size of the group to which an individual belonged (Experiment 1). Mind attribution was affected by group membership rather than the total number of entities perceived at once (Experiment 2). Moreover, mind attribution to an individual varied with the perception that the individual was a group member. Participants attributed more mind to an individual that appeared distinct or distant from other group members than to an individual that was perceived to be similar or proximal to a cohesive group (Experiments 3 and 4). This effect occurred for both human and nonhuman targets, and was driven by the perception of the target as an entitative group member rather than by the knowledge that the target was an entitative group member (Experiment 5).     

Professed impressions: What people say about others affects onlookers’ perceptions of speakers’ power and warmth

During a conversation, it is common for a speaker to describe a third-party that the listener does not know. These professed impressions not only shape the listener’s view of the third-party but also affect judgments of the speaker herself. We propose a previously unstudied consequence of professed impressions: judgments of the speaker’s power. In two studies, we find that listeners ascribe more power to speakers who profess impressions focusing on a third-party’s conscientiousness, compared to those focusing on agreeableness. We also replicate previous research showing that speakers saying positive things about third parties are seen as more agreeable than speakers saying negative things. In the second study, we demonstrate that conscientiousness-power effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ task concerns and positivity-agreeableness effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ other-enhancing concerns. Finally, we show that judgments of speaker status parallel judgments of agreeableness rather than of power, suggesting that perceivers use different processes to make inferences about status and power. These findings have implications for the literatures on person perception, power, and status.     

The automatic and co-occurring activation of multiple social inferences

People make a variety of automatic inferences when observing others' actions. These include inferences about stable dispositions as well as transitory goal states and social situations. However, models of social inference have rarely considered whether different types of automatic inferences can co-occur. We present three experiments in which participants were incidentally exposed to texts depicting behaviors that afforded inferences about actors' traits and the social situations these actors were experiencing. Results from lexical decision and probe-recognition tasks revealed heightened activation of both trait and situational inferences; furthermore, this co-occurring activation was spontaneous, unconscious, and independent of processing resources or specific impression-formation goals. A fourth experiment extended these findings by showing that when participants were asked to make deliberate attributional judgments of the same set of behaviors, typical goal-directed biases reflecting the selection of either trait or situational interpretations emerged. Implications for social inference processes are discussed.     

A model of “substance” and “evaluation” in person judgments

For decades, person perception research has grappled with the distinction between the targets’ actual characteristics (“substance”) and how positively or negatively those characteristics are viewed by perceivers (“evaluation”); however, lack of an overarching theoretical framework makes it difficult to establish connections between related lines of research. We review the relevant literature, and present and test an algebraic model that incorporates the major insights from that literature. The model posits that all person judgments reflect substance and evaluation to different extents. The evaluation component reflects an interaction between the item’s evaluative tone and the perceiver’s evaluative attitude regarding the target person. The model may function as an integrative framework that helps improve conceptual clarity and cumulative progress in person perception research.     

Let me read your mind: Personality judgments based on a person’s natural stream of thought

Past research on the accuracy of personality judgments has largely focused on person perception scenarios that are public in nature (e.g., face-to-face interactions, personal websites). This study investigated the accuracy of personality judgments on the basis of highly private information: a person’s natural stream of thought. Nine naïve judges rated the personality of 90 targets on the basis of their 20-min stream-of-consciousness essays. Judges’ level of accuracy was significant and substantial for all Big Five dimensions. The substantial and relatively uniform accuracy across all Big Five dimensions suggests that a person’s moment-to-moment thoughts provide good information for the accurate judgment of personality in general rather than specific diagnostic information for the accurate judgment of private traits such as Neuroticism.