What is Impression Formation ?

 An Introduction

Luchins (1957) conducted a classic research in which he provided subjects a two-paragraph description of a youngster named Jim. One paragraph Jim is walking to school with his friends and taking part in extracurricular activities To summarise, he was presented as an extrovert. The activities detailed in the second paragraph were similar, but Jim did them all alone, giving him the appearance of an introvert. The two paragraphs were presented to subjects, but the sequence was reversed based on condition. When individuals were asked to construct an overall impression of Jim, their responses indicated a substantial primacy effect. The primacy effect describes a situation in which early information has a greater influence than later knowledge. Subjects who read the extrovert paragraph first were significantly more extraverted than those who read the introvert piece first, and vice versa. Recent research demonstrates that early information is definitely weighted more heavily than later information. This is true even when the new information is very noticeable and clearly contradicts the old.

Recency effects, in which later information is given more weight than earlier information, on the other hand, have been reliably created under three types of situations. First, when people are particularly requested to make a second evaluation after hearing new information, late information takes precedence over early information. Second, recency effects are likely to occur if there is a relatively long time span between the presentation of new information and the initial exposure. Finally, if the task is one for which people believe practise will improve performance, later information is given more weight.

Schemas are the glue that holds our impressions together

Given the variety of individuals and settings encountered in daily life, we may assume that people could easily become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information relating to what others are like. People must organise their impressions of others in order to prevent becoming overwhelmed. They are able to accomplish this through the creation of schemas. Schemas are organised collections of information that are stored in memory. The information in a schema represents how the social world works while also allowing us to categorise and interpret new information related to the schema.

We all have schemas about daily objects in our surroundings. For example, we may have a schema for automobiles: we know what they look like, how they are utilised, what they can accomplish for us, and how to distinguish them from other vehicles such as buses and horse and buggy. More importantly, from a social psychological standpoint, we have a schema for specific people (one's mother, girlfriend, boyfriend, brother, or sister) as well as classes of people who play a specific role. Each of these schemas offers a method for grouping behaviour into meaningful wholes.

Prototypes

In the case of person perception, the personality categories that we infer are organised into schemas known as prototypes. Prototypes are schemas that gather together a set of personality qualities to form a meaningful personality type. For example, Nancy Cantor and Walter Mischel (1979) propose that a commonly held prototype concerns a person who is described as committed on a broad level.

The prototype comprises of several types of committed individuals, such as monks, nuns, and activists, at the most specific level, known as the subordinate level. At the medium level of detail, there are two primary types of people: religious devotees and social activists. The subordinate and middle levels of specificity are included into the larger superordinate level, which comprises the prototype as a whole.

The significance of prototypes can be divided into three categories:

i)Prototypes help people recall, recognise, and categorise information about others more easily. In some ways, the usage of prototypes improves information processing capacities.

ii) Prototypes assist us in organising our social environment. We may categorise people into particular prototypes by watching very few qualities or behaviours, which helps us to establish predictions about the behaviour of others.

iii) Prototypes make it easier for people to prepare their behaviour in social encounters.