Primacy Affected Primates and the Impressions They Make

When a person forms an impression about another person they use a process called impression formation. Impression formation is essentially the process of integrating information about a person to form an impression (Anderson, 1968). It’s basically what we do every time we’re presented with information and have some time to think about it. This basic process lead to Anderson (1981) developing his information integration theory which states that impressions are formed of others based on a combination of the personal dispositions of the perceiver, the weighted average of the target person’s characteristics, and the primacy effect.

Starting with the personal dispositions of the perceiver, perceivers generally will compare the target person to themselves as a standard when making their evaluation of the individual (Dornbusch, Hastorf, Richardson, Muzzy, & Vreeland, 1965). This means that when say you or I make an impression about an individual, we are very likely to compare them to ourselves. If I talked with a person and noticed that they are quiet and shy, that’s me saying that they are quiet and shy compared to me. That same person might be considered outgoing or anxious by someone else. In addition to using ourselves as a standard, our current mood plays a large role on how we see people (Forgas, 2000). Basically, the happier we are, the more likely our impression will be more positive and vice-versa.

As for the target person’s characteristics, the valence of the traits used to describe them plays a huge role in how our impressions are formed about the individual. Valence is just whether something said is viewed as good or bad (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). To back up that first statement, research by Rozin and Royzman (2001) and Skowronski and Carlston (1989) shows that people have a trait negativity bias, which means that negative information is viewed more heavily than positive information. Therefore, when we hear negative things about an individual, we make quicker and harsher assumptions. However, the order we receive the information of the positive or negative traits plays a large role on our impression formation.

The way we are affected by the order in which we are presented information is called the primacy effect (Asch, 1946). When we hear positive things about a person first, we are more likely to form a positive impression, whereas if we hear negative things first, we form a negative impression. The first reason this effect happens is because we tend to tune out after the first few words because we feel we’ve already formed a pretty decent impression about the person (Belmore, 1987). The second reason we experience the primacy effect is because of the “change-of-meaning” hypothesis, which states that we will interpret information in line with first things we were presented about the individual (Asch, 1946).

For this blog, I wanted to show how the order in which we present information about a person can affect the impression we form about them. I read to my participants a short list of words: confident, smart, efficient, assertive, skeptical, and arrogant. For some I read the list from confident to arrogant (Order A) and for others the reverse: arrogant to confident (Order B). This is what I found.

The order of the words did indeed play a role in how the people saw the individual or thought what the individual would do for a living. There were other responses that people said for both like doctor or class president, but those were responses from people that overheard what I was saying to their friends. There were also others that made me wish I had been recording them instead of the people I got. I still had a bit of fun collecting all the answers I could.

Overall, I hoped this showed that the order we are presented information is important when trying to describe a person. I feel this comes into play really well when describing a possible date or friend to others in the hopes of giving them a head start when they finally meet. After that, the other factors that influence impression formation can take over. So until my next blog, I bid thee adieu and leave with this:

References:

Anderson, N. H. (1968). Likeableness ratings of 555 personality-trait words. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 272-279.

Anderson, N. H. (1981). Foundations of information integration theory. New York: Academic Press.

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Belmore, S. M. (1987). Determinants of attention during impression formation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 480-489.

Dornbusch, S. M., Hastorf, A. H., Richardson, S. A., Muzzy, R. E., & Vreeland, R. S. (1965). The perceiver and the perceived: Their relative influence on categories of interpersonal perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1, 434-440.

Forgas, J. P. (Ed.). (2000). Feeling and thinking: Affective influences on social cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Perceiving Persons. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 93-127). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Rozin, P. & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 296-320.

Skowronski, J. J. & Carlston, D. E. (1989). Negativity and extremity biases in impression formation: A review of explanations. Psychology Bulletin, 105, 131-142.

Give and You Shall Receive

So have you ever been given a gift and tried to reject the gift because you knew that you would feel this pang in your mind that told you that you would now have to give a gift to that person? That right there is the norm of reciprocity. The norm of reciprocity states that we treat others as they have treated us--to the best of our abilities I would add (Gouldner, 1960). This norm of reciprocity is essentially the "Golden Rule" on the positive side of things and an "eye for an eye" on the negative.

I feel like the norm of reciprocity is used most during the Christmas season. How often is it that during this time, someone gives you a gift and then you feel this compelling want to give them something in return? For me its pretty often. If anyone gives me a gift during Christmas or for my birthday I always feel compelled to get them something in return.

I've been a firm believer in the whole "you must give to receive" saying for most of my life, so this past Christmas I wanted to give gifts to a few friends knowing full well that by giving them the gift, they would feel compelled to get me something in return. Truth be told I wasn't really expecting something from all of them and wanted to give the gifts because they were really cool people. However, I still gave the gifts and indeed did get some gifts in return, which made me really happy.

Now that I've actually read about this technique and the others: the "foot-in-the-door," the "door in the face," and "that's not all" techniques (I'd only ever use low balling against someone I don't like), I feel like I can use them a lot more to make some gains. Especially for upcoming informational sessions I have to help out with or for collecting donations for Habitat for Humanity or Relay for Life. I could also very easily apply them at home more efficiently to get some gains. The tricks may be devious, but they're being used for a good cause in any situation that I would apply them.



References:

Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 25, 161-178.

Here comes the Choo-Choo...

So as I was sitting here trying to think of things in my life that make me think of cognitive dissonance, the first thing that came to my mind was food. Not because I was hungry at the time of writing this, but because when I thought back to what I wouldn't eat when I was young compared to what I will eat now, there have been some changes in my attitudes towards them.

The cognitive dissonance theory states that holding cognitions inconsistent with our behavior arouses psychological tension that we try to reduce by ultimately changing our attitudes about the behavior (Festinger, 1957). What better thing than food for this to apply to?

I remember my mom using both insufficient justification and insufficient deterrence to egg me on to eat my vegetables. Insufficient justification being a condition in which people freely perform an attitude discrepant behavior without receiving a large reward and insufficient deterrence being a condition in which people refrain from engaging in a desirable activity, even when only a mild punishment is threatened (Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959; Aronson and Carlsmith, 1963).

In my youth, I used to hate spinach, broccoli, and all those other leafy green goodies. Nowadays, I'll take them as a side to my meal no problem and even like eating spinach and broccoli. My mom got this change to happen over the course of time we would go to Luby's. At the end of the food line there is always a spot for Jello and boy did I like Jello, but I also loved cake. If I could have one or the other, cake would most certainly have won out.

So, the way she used insufficient justification was that she would give me Jello instead of cake for eating my veggies. Being that my desired behavior would be to not eat the veggies, she used insufficient deterrence by saying she'd be disappointed if I didn't eat my veggies rather than offering a whoopin' if I didn't. She'd also throw in little things to make me look at the veggies differently like using Popeye for eating spinach or calling the cuts of broccoli trees to that I could devour the tree like a dinosaur (I really liked dinosaurs--real and fake--as a kid and if you know those <-- particular dinosaurs I just want you to know that you're awesome).

All in all, she got me to eventually like veggies to the point that I would order them on my own. Granted there are some foods that I still refuse to eat like raw onions, tomatoes by themselves, and grapefruit. So, I plan on using these methods on my children when they get older so they can be omnivores like me.


Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-210.

Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1963). Effects of severity of threat on the devaluation of forbidden behavior. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66, 584-588.

Just Like You Like It

I've noticed that for the most part when I watch TV shows or funny videos on the internet, the commercials that come up usually have someone really pretty or well known to deliver the message. Now, in order to be persuaded, there are several things that must be looked at: the source, the message, and the audience (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). For the sake of this particular blog, I'm going to look at the likeability variable of the source factor.

The likeability variable is pretty straight forward. It states that we are more easily persuaded when we like the spokesperson (or animal) that is presenting the information (Carnegie, 1936). The way we begin to like a person are simply through similarity and personal attractiveness (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008).

So let's start with similarity. The first commercial that came to my mind was the Jack In The Box commercial for the 2 tacos for 99 cents. Immediately after I saw it, I was like..."wow, Jack really knows his target audience." He sets up a similarity between the driver ordering the tacos and anybody who has ever had the munchies.



On the flip side to likeability, we now have physical attractiveness. Being a gamer, when I saw this commercial on the internet for the differences between the Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii it made me laugh quite a bit. Please keep in mind that I already had a Wii before I saw this video and got a PS3 way after this commercial came out (Also, I got it for the sake of having all three next gen systems in our living room--Matt's Xbox 360, Mary's Wii, and my PS3). This ad uses physical attraction to get more male gamers to buy the Wii over the PS3.



Overall, advertising execs know how to hook those who use the peripheral route to persuasion really well. People who use the peripheral route often evaluate a communication by using simple-minded heuristics (Chaiken, 1987).





Here are some other commercials and my guesses for the method of source/message delivery that I thought were neat, but didn't feel like including in the main write up.

(Physical Attraction) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE
(Sneak Attack) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKmw8dKiWq4
(Similarity) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbsdlSpA2GU

References:

Carnegie, D. (1936). How to win friends and influence people. New York: Pocket Books. (Reprinted in 1972).

Chaiken, S. (1987). The heuristic model of persuasion. In M. P. Zanna, J. M. Olson, & C. P. Herman (Eds.), Social influence:The Ontario symposium (Vol. 5, pp. 3-39). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Perceiving Persons. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 306-312). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Petty, R.E., & Cacioppo, J.T., (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Racism and Gender in Science: My IAT Results

Along with most other people out there, I would like to think that I know my attitudes towards race and gender pretty well. At least that’s what I think superficially. Being Hispanic, I feel like I’m pretty confident that I don’t discriminate or feel prejudice towards those of a different race. My two best friends are black and white. I would like to think I’m fair in my opinion that women can be good at science just as well , if not more so, than men being a chemistry major here at Southwestern. Thinking about chemistry majors that I know within my year, there are five men and four women. However, when it comes to biology majors that I can think of, the number of women far exceeds the number of men.

All in all, I wanted to see what my levels of modern racism and I guess for the sake of this blog, modern sexism would be. Modern racism if defined as a form of prejudice that surfaces in subtle ways when it is safe, socially acceptable, and easy to rationalize (Hass, Katz, Rizzo, Bailey, and Moore, 1992). I’m expanding this to sexism (specifically in science) as well, which is the prejudice and discrimination based on a person’s gender (Stangor, Lynch, Changming, and Glass, 1992). In hindsight, I feel like I sometimes partake in implicit racism when I’m out at a restaurant or out and about. Implicit racism is the activation and application of stereotypes without conscious awareness (Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, and Johnson, 2006). So to determine how I subconsciously feel about both of these areas, I took the Implicit Association Tests (IAT) for Race and Gender-Science.

The IAT measures unconscious attitudes by measuring the speed at which people associate pairs of concepts (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998). Things such as implicit racism and implicit sexism are, well, implicit attitudes: attitudes we aren’t aware of having (Fazio and Olson, 2003). To summarize what goes on in an IAT, the participant will categorize several association pairs as quickly as possible over several stages by typing either the E or I keys on the keyboard.

In addition to normal implicit attitudes and stereotypes, drinking has been shown to impair people’s control over stereotype activation and application (Bartholow, Dickter, and Sestir, 2006). I took the Race IAT twice, once without drinking and the second time after some time at Study Break to see if my implicit prejudice had changed. The Gender-Science IAT was taken only once before the trip to Study Break.

So I was pretty happy with my result for the Race IAT. My results showed that I have “little to no automatic preference between African American and European American.” The results make me glad to know that I know myself relatively decently in reference to my level of racism. I guess I could attribute the non-preference to the high school I attended, considering you could count the white students on two hands. However, despite my fairness pre-Study Break, the post-Study Break results showed that I have a “strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American.” I find this weird, but not really considering that our conscious attitudes may not always match our implicit attitudes.

The pre-Study Break results reminded me of the group of friends I had when I was in high school. Pardon the slang, but if one was to look at our group, we were two Hispanics, one black guy, one white guy, and one Asian guy. Only thing was that the “Asian” in our was a friend who was Hispanic but had slightly slanted eyes, so we kind of teased him about it, granted he was free to tease us as he saw fit as well. Basically, we made fun of each other a lot.

Anecdote aside, my results for the Gender-Science IAT kind of threw me for a loop. I thought that I was fair minded of having both sexes in the sciences, but my IAT results say otherwise. The results stated that I have a “strong association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts compared to Female with Science and Male with Liberal Arts.” Evidently, deep down I think men should be in science more so than women, even though that isn’t the case consciously.

These results overall don’t change how I feel consciously about race or gender in science. Like I said, I’m glad to see that my results for the Race IAT confirmed how I feel, but did not agree with my results for the Gender-Science IAT. Now that I’ve taken these two tests, I kind of want to see what the others say about my implicit attitudes.

Bartholow, B.D., Dickter, C. L., & Sestir, M. A. (2006). Stereotype activation and control of race bias: Cognitive control of inhibition and its impairment by alcohol. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 272-287.

Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P. G., Purdie-Vaughns, V. J., & Johnson, S. L. (2006). Precieved stereotypicality of black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science, 17, 383-386.

Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition research: Their meaning and use. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297-327.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K., (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.

Hass, R. G., Katz, L., Rizzo, N., Bailey, J., & Moore, L. (1992). When racial ambivalence evokes negative affect, using a disguised measure of mood. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, 786-797.

Stangor, C., Lynch, L., Changming, D., & Glass, B. (1992). Categorization of individuals on the basis of multiple social features. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 207-218.