Impression formation and perception of individual essay

Impression Formation and Perception of Individual as Person with Positive or Negative Traits Depending on the Warm-Cold Adjective Presence in Individual Description

One of the important questions in social psychology has been the process of formation of an impression of one person in the perception of another person. Although this process is subjective for every individual, a number of experiments for studying the process of impression formation have been done. One of the first quantifiable and measurable research results on impression formation have been obtained by Solomon Asch (1946), who discovered that individual impression in the perception of a particular person is formed as a unified concept based on the sum of several related judgments (impressions) (Mensh & Wishner, 1947). Using a series of experiments where participants were asked to hear a short list of adjectives characterizing personality, and asking them to write a brief description of this personality, Asch discovered several phenomena.

First of all, despite the specific list of adjectives given to participants, they did not describe the perceived subject in these terms, but rather formed a general impression basing on these traits. Secondly, there emerged “central” traits, the change in which significantly changed the overall impression of the individual, and “peripheral” traits, the change in which did not significantly affect the perception (Asch, 1946). Thirdly, Asch discovered that interpretation of traits depended on the context created by other traits, and “central” traits tended to affect a group of perceived traits, rather than the whole perception of an individual. Fourthly, the omission of “central” traits (e.g. warm-cold trait) from the description of the personality was treated in a specific way by the participants: they still inferred that the subject possessed that quality, and participants could be divided into almost equal groups basing on their assumptions regarding this central trait.

Asch proved that formation of an impression is an organized process in human perception rather than summarization of particular traits, and through a long series of experiments studied the specific mechanisms of impression formation. Later studies in this area have showed that Asch’s experiments were confirmed in real-life settings, and the perception of teacher by student participants, even after live interaction, was largely shaped by the inferential impression after listening to the adjectives (Kelley, 1950). The purpose of this research is to test the effect of warm-cold pair of adjectives on impression formation, to compare the results with the results of Asch’s experiment, and to test statistical difference between overall positive and negative perception of an individual basing on the difference in warm-cold trait.

Method

Subjects

There were 18 participants selected for this experiment, all of them were students; the group included both junior and senior students. Mean age of participants was 21.6 years. The majority of them were women – 72.2% (13 participants), and 27.8% were male (5 participants). 94.4% of them were right-handed (17 participants), and 5.6% were left-handed (1 participant). 38.9% of participants were junior students (7 participants), and 61.1% of them were senior students (11 participants). All participants were mentally healthy and did not have any previous record of mental disease.

Apparatus and Procedures

The participants were not aware of the nature of the experiment. They were located in a comfortable room next to personal computers, and were asked to listen to a person’s description, with a request to answer questions about that person’s characteristics after forming the impression. The participants heard an instruction on their next actions and on the procedure before the start of the experiment. The list was to be read twice, with an interval of 5 seconds between first and second reading; after that, the participants passed through a 10-minute test where they had to make forced search between two pairs of adjectives characterizing the perceived individual.

All participants heard a number of specific characteristics (traits) which were said to belong to a particular person. The list of terms included such characteristics as energetic, talkative, assured, inquisitive, ironical and persuasive.

The participants were assigned by random selection into 2 groups of 9 people: one of these groups was supposed to hear the basic set of characteristics for the perceived subject along with “warm” trait description, while the other group was to hear the basic set of characteristics along with “cold” trait description. One participant of the group assigned “cold” trait was excluded from the experiment due to personal reasons.

The pairs of traits included in the forced choice test were similar to Asch’s experiment: generous-ungenerous, wise-shrewd, happy-unhappy, good-natured-irritable, humorous-humorless, sociable-unsociable, popular-unpopular, reliable-unreliable, important-insignificant, humane-ruthless, good-looking-unattractive, persistent-unstable, serious-frivolous, restrained-talkative, altruistic-self-centered, imaginative-hard-headed, strong-weak, and honest-dishonest.

Results

Overall results appeared to be rather similar to the results of Asch’s experiment I. Figure 1 illustrates the results obtained in this experiment, and Figure 2 shows the results of Asch’s experiment.

In particular, it was determined that warm-cold pair of traits results in significant changes in perception of the following traits: generous – ungenerous, wise-shrewd, happy-unhappy, good-natured-irritable, humorous-humorless, social-unsocial, popular-unpopular, humane-ruthless, and imaginative-hard-headed.

Moreover, the mean difference between positive and negative scores appeared to be significant: for the “warm” group, mean percentage of choice of positive traits was 90.61%, while for the “cold” group mean percentage of positive traits was only 42.2%. For the group who heard the “warm” adjective, the number of positive adjectives chosen was 147, and the number of negative adjectives was 15; while for the group who heard the “cold” adjective, there were only 83 positive adjectives chosen, and 65 negative. Figure 3 illustrates the effect of “warm-cold” adjective choice on the perception of the person as positive (number of positive traits) or negative (negative traits chosen).

Chi-square analysis of the number of positive and negative adjectives depending on the warm-cold personality characteristics showed that there existed a significant difference between answers of “warm” and “cold” groups: chi-square value was equal to 0485, with 1 degree of freedom, and p-value was less than 0.001. Thus, the presence of “warm” or “cold” adjective in the person’s characteristics significantly affects the perception of this individual as more positive (in case of “warm” adjective) or more negative (in case of “cold” adjective).

Discussion

Overall, the results of the experiment proved the following Asch’s findings: a) there exist “central” and “peripheral” qualities, and b) warm-cold pair of adjectives belongs to the central pair of traits which guide impression formation of an individual. The results of the experiment have also provided statistical evidence for stating that the presence of “warm” adjective in the description changed the perception of the individual to mostly positive, while the presence of “cold” adjective in the description changed the perception of the individual to more negative.

As a development of this experiment, it would be interesting to determine what are the groups of adjectives paired together, e.g. the perception of what traits depends on the particular central traits. It would also be meaningful to perform analysis of gender differences in the formation of impression. However, in the case of this experiment it would not be reasonable, because male participants were underrepresented in this experiment. Furthermore, it would be useful to establish the strength of statistical relationship between positive and negative perception of an individual, and the presence of particular central traits (not only warm-cold pair).