478 CHAPTER 12
(Fiske, 1998). Stereotypes (although not always negative) are very limiting, causing people to
misjudge what others are like and often to treat them differently as a result. Add the process of
stereotyping to the primacy effect and it becomes easy to see how important first impressions
really are. That first impression not only has more importance than any other information
gathered about a person later on but may include a stereotype that is resistant to change as
well (Hall et al., 2013; Hilton & von Hipple, 1996; Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003).It sounds as though we’d be better off if people didn’t use social
categorization.Social categorization does have an important place in the perception of others. It
allows people to access a great deal of information that can be useful about others, as well
as helping people remember and organize information about the characteristics of others
(Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). The way to avoid falling into the trap of negatively stereo-
typing someone is to be aware of existing stereotypes and apply a little critical thinking:
“Okay, so he’s a guy with a lot of piercings. That doesn’t mean that he’s overly aggres-
sive—it just means he has a lot of piercings.”
IMPLICIT PERSONALITY THEORIES The categories into which people place others are
based on something called an implicit personality theory. Implicit personality theories
are sets of assumptions that people have about how different types of people, personal-
ity traits, and actions are all related and form in childhood (Dweck et al., 1995; Erdley &
Dweck, 1993; Plaks et al., 2005). For example, many people have an implicit personality
theory that includes the idea that happy people are also friendly people and people who
are quiet are shy. Although these assumptions or beliefs are not necessarily true, they do
serve the function of helping organize schemas, or mental patterns that represent (in this
case) what a person believes about certain “types” of people. (The concept of schema
here is similar to the complex schemes proposed by Piaget. to Learning Objec-
tive 8.7.) Of course, the schemas formed in this way can easily become stereotypes when
people have limited experience with others who are different from them, especially in
superficial ways such as skin color or other physical characteristics (Levy et al., 1998).
There is a test designed to measure the implicit attitudes that make up one’s implicit
personality theory, called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;
Greenwald et al., 1998). The test, taken by computer, measures the degree of association
between certain pairs of concepts. For example, you might see the word “pleasant” on one
side of the computer screen and the word “unpleasant” on the other side. In the middle
would be another word that may be associated with one or the other of the two categories.
You would be asked to sort the word into the appropriate category by pressing certain
keys as quickly as you can. The computer measures reaction times, and it is the differ-
ence in reaction times over a series of similar comparisons that reveals implicit attitudes
(Nosek et al., 2007). To try it out for yourself, participate in the experiment Implicit Associa-
tion Test: Prejudice. Simulate the Experiment Implicit Association Test: Prejudice
Some evidence suggests that implicit personality theories may differ from culture
to culture as well as from individual to individual. For example, one study found that
Americans and Hong Kong Chinese people have different implicit personality theories
about how much the personality of an individual is able to change. Whereas Ameri-
cans assume that personality is relatively fixed and unchanging, Chinese people native
to Hong Kong assume that personalities are far more changeable (Chiu et al., 1997).Attribution
12.9 Describe the process of explaining one’s own behavior and the behavior
of others.
Another aspect of social cognition is the need people seem to have to explain the behav-
ior of other people. Have you ever watched someone who was doing something youimplicit personality theory
sets of assumptions about how different
types of people, personality traits, and
actions are related to each other.