Although Asch acknowledges that warmth plays an important role in impression formation, in his view, any trait can be central as well as peripheral. Social perception, impression formation, attribution, and social-cognitive biases are important and essential components to most college introductory social psychology courses [4]. Social Psychologist Solomon Asch was a pioneer in Gestalt Psychology. Although it may seem as if the present replication attempt proves Asch (1946) wrong, note that Asch never claimed that warmth should be primary over competence. additional findings are available on the project page on the Open Science Intelligent, not cold, seemed the primary determinant of participant’s impressions of personality. To find out if warm and cold were more central than other traits within Conditions 1 and 2, we first investigated which traits were ranked as most influential in shaping perceivers’ impressions (see Table 2 ). Impression Formation - Psychology bibliographies - in Harvard style . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(3), 380–391. This limitation was acknowledged by Asch (1946), but seems to have been overlooked in many later references to his work. The open-ended responses that were important in Asch’s theorizing were not systematically analyzed; the trait-pair choice measure seems unfit to test primacy-of-warmth; and the results of the ranking measure suggest that warmth was not central in determining participant’s impressions. Although there is not one unitary message to be taken from the work (which has been cited over 2,750 times), the message that seems to have most strongly resonated with present-day researchers concerns the primacy-of-warmth effect. In the first experiment he describes, participants in one of two conditions heard read a list of character-qualities that were identical except for one word. The independence of evaluation and item information: Impression and recall order effects in behavior-based impression formation. In the resulting index, higher scores reflect more positive descriptions. The reader no doubt, while doing a basic course in psychology must have become familiar with the process of perception and some of the principles governing the same. Based on these experiments, Asch (1946) concluded that perceivers form coherent, unitary impressions of others. processes, Effect of closure on formation of Fourth, the study proposal and materials were preregistered. In light of these recent findings, it may seem unimportant that Asch’s data do not provide evidence for primacy-of-warmth, because, after all, the effect seems present in more modern studies. Further evidence, Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on on the primacy effect in impression formation, From acts to dispositions: The attribution This research was partially Primacy of warmth versus competence: A motivated Although “Forming Impressions of Personality” has been regarded as a first demonstration of the primacy-of-warmth effect (e.g., Abele & Bruckmüller, 2011; Abele & Wojciszke, 2007; Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2008; Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005; Kervyn, Yzerbyt, & Judd, 2010; Richetin, Durante, Mari, Perugini, & Volpato, 2012; Vonk, 1994), it is unclear whether Asch’s original studies provide replicable evidence for the effect. Asch was curious how much, if at all, changing one word of the description would change the overall impression of the hypothetical person. approach to teaching social psychology topics in an undergraduate college course. They were mostly beginners in psychology. Instead, the role of warmth was highly context-dependent, and competence was at least as important in shaping impressions as warmth. In the present replication attempt, we aimed to critically examine the extent to which Asch’s seminal “Forming impressions of personality” (1946) provides evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI More information on the interpretation of warmth in different conditions is available in the Additional Findings. Asch reports his findings from the first study alongside experiment two and three’s results in Table Two. According to Asch (1946), warm and cold should be central in Conditions 1 and 2 when accompanied by traits like intelligent, skillful, industrious, determined, practical, and cautious (original Study I), but not in Conditions 3–5 when accompanied by traits like obedient, weak, shallow, unambitious, and vain (original Study IV). By focusing on an incomplete and incorrect interpretation of Asch’s work, researchers forfeit the chance to learn from the subtleties and complexities of his ideas and the intricacies of his thinking, and run the risk of overestimating the evidence there is for the primacy-of-warmth effect. A Brief History of Theory and Research on Impression Formation Automaticity and Control in Stereotyping and Prejudice: The Revolutionary Role of Social Cognition Across Three Decades of Research Attribution as a Gateway to Social Cognition A Dictionary of Sociology Preferential Linguistics, Reanalysis of “impressions of The two major theories of impression formation - Asch's theory of impression formation and the information integration theory are applied to explain the sharply contrasting scholarly views held about impression formation but one noteworthy concern is that they both offer accurate explanations of how both the externalities and internalities affect our impression before others. In recent years there has been considerable interest in impression formation and group perception individually and combined. I repeated this measure for each dependent variable and condition in all three experiments. The “restrained” data further support Asch’s conclusions, as Experiment III failed to replicate prior findings (χ2(1, N=46) =0.63, ns). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1758 – 68. The Chi-Square Tests for Independence generally support Asch’s qualitative claims, upholding his conclusion that character traits affect impression formation differentially. Written long before the dawn of bite-size science (Bertamini & Munafo, 2012) and the advice to “role-play grandma” to create a clear storyline (Bem, 1987, p. 27), “Forming Impressions of Personality” (Asch, 1946) is as interesting as it is multifaceted. Asch’s seminal research on “Forming Impressions of Personality” (1946) has widely been cited as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect, suggesting that warmth-related judgments have a stronger influence on impressions of personality than competence-related judgments (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Wojciszke, 2005). Looking at differences in “importance” in Experiment I, a significant difference existed between conditions. A Finally, to check whether our textual analysis may have missed subtle references to warmth, we asked an independent coder to rate for 350 (out of 1,023) randomly selected descriptions to what extent warmth or coldness was conveyed (more information is available in the Additional Findings). relations between judgments of competence and warmth, The What are these conditions? One reason for Asch (1946) to conclude that warmth was central in impression formation was that the valence of impressions in his studies seemed to change dramatically when replacing warm by cold (as in Asch’s original Study I), but not when replacing polite by blunt (as in Asch’s original Study IV). I decided to embark on a (very nerdy) adventure exploring Asch’s data. © 2014 Hogrefe Publishing. The present research suggests that Asch’s data do not provide evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect; if anything, competence seems more primary in his studies. Traits were presented one by one for 3 s each, with 2 s between traits. It has frequently been said that “first impressions matter.” Social psychological research supports this idea. Impression formation in social psychology refers to the processes by which different pieces of knowledge about another are combined into a global or summary impression. Effect of stimulus inconsistency and discounting instructions in personality impression formation. Wilcoxon signed rank tests confirmed that intelligent received lower average ranks than cold, Z(2, N = 130) = −4.39, p < .001, r = 0.14, with mean ranks of 2.34 and 3.77, respectively. We found no evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. The results for this measure do not provide any evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect: In Study I, warmth was ranked highest by 6 out of 42 participants, the exact amount that could be expected by chance (given that there are seven options). For the ranking measure, participants ranked all traits from the stimulus list from most to least important to their impression. IMPRESSION FORMATION : When one person meets another for the first time, it is the first opportunity either person will have to make initial evaluations and judgments about the other. In Condition 2, cold versus intelligent were mentioned equally often, F < 1, with means of 0.27 and 0.24, respectively. Impression formation is essentially a form of person perception. 4 Asch’s research was published in 1946, when reporting statistical analyses was not yet customary (and many analyses still had to be invented). Social psychological laboratories have undergone considerable change since the publication of Asch’s “Forming Impressions of Personality” in 1946, leading to the inevitable demise of punch cards and slide carousels in favor of more advanced experimental equipment. Consequently, the interpretation of these data was heavily contested by his contemporaries (e.g., Gollin, 1954; Luchins, 1948). Cognitive and Learning Styles: The reader is already familiar with the role of cognitive and learning … They also contain analyses suggesting that almost all participants formed unified impressions in which they went beyond the information given, creating elaborate narratives about things that were not included in the original trait lists they had been exposed to (such as other traits, occupations, and gender). Thus, warm was central in Asch’s Study I when accompanied by traits like intelligent, skillful, industrious, determined, practical, and cautious, but was peripheral in Asch’s Study IV when accompanied by traits like obedient, weak, shallow, unambitious, and vain. Though this effect has been replicated repeatedly (e.g., Mensh & Wishner, 1947; Veness & Brierley, 1963; Semin, 1989), it may not provide the most stringent test of the primacy-of-warmth hypothesis, as changing any positive trait into a negative one is likely to influence the overall valence of the trait-list. In Condition 2, the average warmth-index was not significantly different from zero, t(103) = −0.68, p = .50, M = −0.08, suggesting that the traits participants used were overall equally related to competence and warmth. Automatic vigilance: The attention-grabbing power of negative social information. Additive vs. 1 In the present research, in line with the recommendations by Fiske et al. Impression Formation as Cognitive Algebra - Based on the notion that people are rational thinkers. From this study, Asch concluded that participants treated warm and cold as relatively central in forming impressions, transforming their impressions when warm was replaced by cold. Determining “[c]ertain qualities are preponderantly assigned to the ‘warm’ person, while the opposing qualities are equally prominent in the ‘cold’ person,” (p. 264), Asch places “restrained” and “important” in the category of traits unaffected by his manipulation. Checklist (Trait-Pair Choice Measure) as Used in, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, The bigger one of the “Big Two”? These have identified phenomena such as primacy effects and halo effects. In our view, this study does not provide unequivocal evidence for primacy-of-warmth, as is apparent from the three measures Asch used in his research (the open-ended, trait-pair choice, and ranking measures). In fact, in these conditions, warmth and coldness received the lowest rank out of the entire trait lists, suggesting that they were the least important traits in determining participants’ impressions. Centrality, in his view, was a property multiple traits could possess simultaneously, a property determined by “the whole system of relations between traits” (p. 284). Next, we calculated the difference between competence-relatedness scores and warmth-relatedness scores, forming a warmth-index. impression formation in social psychology courses. formation, Further evidence for meaning change in impression In 1946, he published his findings from several experiments in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (which I highly recommend you read here). He is credited with the seminal research on impression formation and conducted research on how individuals integrate information about … In fact, Asch was upfront about the fact that warmth, though important, was not primary in his studies: “That the rankings are not higher is due to the fact that the lists contained other central traits.” (p. 7, emphasis added). contribution of linguistic factors to attribute inferences and semantic exclusions, manipulations, and measures, and how we determined our sample sizes. The Significance of Impression Formation: Reinterpreting Early Social Psychology Findings Using Modern Stats. Because Asch ran his experiments almost 70 years ago, he reported his results as the percentages of people who endorsed a given trait in their sketch. Because this effect does not fit with Asch’s Gestalt-view on impression formation and does not readily follow from the data presented in his original paper, the goal of the present study was to critically examine and replicate the studies of Asch’s paper that are most relevant to the primacy-of-warmth effect. We will now discuss each of these measures in turn. Asch’s seminal research on “Forming Impressions of Personality” (1946) has widely been cited as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect, suggesting that warmth-related judgments have a stronger influence on impressions of personality than competence-related judgments (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Wojciszke, 2005). 1.1 Twofold conceptualizations of content in social psychology. As expected, descriptions were more positive for warm, M (Condition 1) = 3.24, than for cold, M (Condition 2) = 1.77, F(1, 288) = 31.54, p < .001. η p 2 = .10. impressions, Causal perceptions of intertrait relations: The glue that holds In our replication of Asch’s studies, we failed to find any evidence for primacy-of-warmth. Moreover, we conducted a direct replication of those studies in Asch’s publication that are particularly relevant to this effect. Chi-Square values for all dependent variables, Experiments I-III, Table 2 was taken from the results of Experiments 1-3 published by Asch (1946) and used by me to test their statistical signficance, Cognition and Perception, Developmental Psychology, Education, General Psychology, Government and Policy, Health Psychology and ..., Social Psychology, emotion, film, kids, Media, non-verbal communication, psychology, Clinical Psychology, General Psychology, Social Psychology, american, Asian, clinical, collectivism, culture, depression, independence, interdependence, psychology, self-construal. multidimensional approach to the structure of personality Dimensional models suggest that impressions of personality can be captured by a limited number of domains (such as warmth and competence; e.g., Fiske et al., 2007), and have given rise to an increase in research on the primacy-of-warmth effect. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target (person, object, scene, etc.) to associationistic and dimensional models of person perception, Likableness ratings of 555 personality-trait words, Primacy effects in personality impression Impression formation is defined as a procedure whereby specific pieces of information about someone else are combined to… Asch (1946) based his conclusions to a large extent on these open-ended responses, providing many anecdotes, but never systematically analyzing the data. Still, the basic methodology underlying present-day person perception research is strongly grounded in Asch’s paradigm-shifting paper, in which impression formation was studied in a controlled laboratory setting, yielding high internal validity and experimental precision (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Gilbert, 1998). In psychology Fritz Heider's writings on balance theory emphasized that liking or disliking a person depends on how the person is positively or negatively linked to other liked or disliked entities. In sum, the descriptions participants provided about the target person contained many traits that were not part of the originally presented trait lists, suggesting that participants went beyond the information given and made inferences about the target person’s other traits. personality”, Morality and competence in person- and In sum, Asch’s data (1946) do not provide clear evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. Not warmth, but intelligence, was primary in shaping participants’ impressions. We report all data Start studying Social Psychology: Impression Formation. He was interested in how we judge others and their personality based off small bits of information. For example, his stimulus lists contained unequal amounts of warmth- and competence-related traits and the ranking measure presupposes that perceivers can reliably indicate which traits influenced their impressions (which may not be the case; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Change style powered by CSL. This ever-changing, context-dependent nature of centrality that is a key element of Gestalt-models seems to be at least somewhat at odds with the much more simple and parsimonious view that is portrayed by dimensional models, in which warmth is usually seen as central (and as primary over competence). One of the main problems in this area has been to determine whether people use additive or non-additive models to combine the information. If the warm-cold dimension was at the heart of participants’ impressions, warm and cold should be mentioned more often in their descriptions of the target person than any other trait from the presented lists. The warm-cold dimension played an important (though not primary) role in determining participant’s impressions when accompanied by traits such as intelligent, skillful, industrious, determined, practical, and cautious (Condition 1), but it became entirely peripheral in the context of other traits (Conditions 3 through 5). Introductory textbooks presently put more emphasis on Asch’s research (1946) as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect than on the Gestalt-model that was its actual focus. The remaining 1,023 participants5 (474 males) were on average 33 years old (range 18–75 years). Participants were recruited through MTurk in exchange for $1. Further, both were mentioned more frequently than any other trait (means between 0.01 and 0.11, all Fs > 6.32, all ps < .05, all η p 2’s = .04–.06). Generally, Asch’s qualitatively-based conclusions hold true, with discrepancies only further validating his claims. The present research coincides with Asch’s idea that the centrality of warmth is highly context-dependent. Social cognition literature conceptualizes impressions via a number of constructs. dimensions of social perception, Investigating variation in replicability: The “many Contrary to predictions based on primacy-of-warmth, participants used traits more strongly related to competence in Condition 1, t(136) = −3.81, p < .001, with an average warmth-index of −0.33, Cohen’s d = −0.32. osf.io/r6idy/. In sum, the open-ended descriptions do not provide evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2(4), pp.531-539. Concurring with Condition 1, the results for the cold-list do not provide clear evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. others, Need for cognition as moderator of the primacy Then, all traits were repeated once (cf. 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