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.