Positive Thinking by: Amit Abraham

Perceiving Others - Impression Formation

"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions
Knowing others is as important as knowing yourself."

Your thinking and personality development is largely influenced by the world around you. How do we come to know about other people? Our first impression of others is initially based on the information we hear about them and, in some instances, the inferences we make about the cause for their behaviour. When we have only a limited amount of information available we tend to fill in the gaps to arrive at a fairly complete and comprehensive image of the individual in question.
Forming impressions of other people is probably so natural and habitual that everyone does it, consciously or unconsciously. Impression formation is a process by which information about others is converted into more or less enduring cognitions or thoughts about them.
When we first meet someone we have access to considerable information - how the person looks and what he or she does and says. According to one point of view, we are not overwhelmed by the abundance of this information because we are able to group it into categories that predict things of importance to us. These categories and their perceived interrelationships form the basic cognitive framework by which, we understand others. The linkages among these categories will determine what predictions we make about someone when we have only limited information. If, for example, you think people who wear glasses are intelligent, then whenever you meet a stranger wearing glasses, you will be disposed to believe that he or she is highly intelligent.
All categories are related to some other categories and unrelated to many more. In your mind, wearing glasses might also be related to 'timidness' but not to 'honesty' or 'sense of humour'. By generating predictors or expectations, we can efficiently interact with other people even when we possess only minimal information about them.
Of course there is no guarantee that different people will categorise a given piece of information in the same way. You have probably had the experience of finding that your first impression of a person differs markedly from that of your friends. There is evidence that people vary in the way they tend to evaluate others on first meeting them. One such difference is that some people are predisposed to like everyone they meet. They may focus on the desirable characteristics of others and search for evidence that people possess certain favourable traits. Others have a tendency to dislike people on their first meeting and may try to discover the existence of undesirable characteristics. The categories we use and their assumed interrelationships constitute our template or framework for understanding the world in which we live. This framework, in essence, is our theory about how things are supposed to work.
For understanding other people, the category most frequently used is the trait. Traits are classification schemes for describing the behaviour of individuals. Our language provides us with many options for describing behaviour, such as assertive, friendly, punctual or talkative. Traits are a compelling set of categories used to describe, remember and communicate our own and other person's behaviour. Traits are also perceivea to be interrelated; they seem to occur in clusters. You might, for example, assume that people who are assertive are also ambitious or that intelligent people are also industrious. This assumed relationship among traits is called implicit personality theory, a name that underscores how our own cognitive framework generates predictions about other people that go beyond the information available to us. Implicit personality theory helps us to simplify the information we receive in social interaction, colour the way we interpret events and guide our responses to other people.
When you meet someone, you observe that person and assume that he or she possesses a certain set of traits.
To make this decision, you must make a global judgment about how favourable you feel towards the person. One procedure you might follow is to add the favourable traits together. You will have a more positive impression. If you think a person is both kind and honest, than if you think the person is simply kind. On the other hand, you might average these two pieces of information, in which case your impression would remain about the same - the average of the two favourable traits would be close to the value of each of them alone. The averaging model is probably closer to what you would actually do; except that it would not be quite simple. Instead, certain pieces of information would be seen as more important and thus would be weighted more heavily than others; your overall impression would represent a weighted average of the information you have about that person. One thing you would consider is the relevance of the information for the particular judgment you are making. You assign importance to different characteristics in assessing different persons. Information obtained first also seems to be weighted more heavily. Most people believe there is some value in making a good first impression, and research shows that such efforts are not wasted; a primacy effect does often occur in impression formation.
Furthermore, we generally give more importance to information concerning negative traits than to information concerning positive traits that others might possess. Each of these factors affects the weight people give to various pieces of information, when forming an impression of another person.
Now how does one go about doing this evaluation work? A list of adjectives is given in Table 1 with the help of which we can measure the tendency to evaluate others in a positie 2 rharacteristics inn. efore reading further, check the 12 characteristics that concern you in evaluating others. (For the moment, ignore the letters that follow the traits.)