They're smarter than that...

Hey everyone!

Before I start, watch this neat video and (ideally) form a positive impression of me and this blog post. 

Anyway, it's pretty easy to think back on experiences I've had and how I likely formed impressions of people and how that affected my behavior towards that person. Particularly interesting to me is when we have a pretty strongly formed idea about a person that is suddenly challenged and we deny whatever introduced that challenge to our idea about the person. The reason we deny the challenge is because of implicit personality theory which proposes that we have a network of traits that we associate together and therefore, when we know that an individual has one trait, that leads us to infer that they have other traits as well (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954; Schneider, 1973; Sedikides & Anderson, 1994).

Reasonably this would occur both when we hear a positive or negative trait (or get information) about a person, that information would lead us to assume other traits about a person that are connected with the initial information we obtained. Furthermore, this is why we deny the information that challenges our construction for the person. In other words, when the new information contradicts the current associations with traits and behaviors, we dislike it because we have made the assumption that the person will not act that way or have that trait because it is not associated with the original information we obtained.

A personal example of this happened last year with friend who attends another university. In short, there was a girl who liked him quite a bit and was quite pushy with her affections and he was not interested in a relationship with her (or encouraging affection from her due to the emotional nightmare that would likely result). One time towards the end of the summer, she convinced him that she should sleep over because she was too drunk to drive home despite the fact that he knew that he shouldn't let her in order to not encourage such behavior (I'm not encouraging drunk driving here, just she could have stayed at a nearby friends house, or had someone come pick her up, or whatever).

Now, this dude is usually reasonable and makes pretty good and responsible decisions with things such as school work, how he has fun, but also definitely in helping people with inter/intra personal concerns. In fact, these are central traits to me regarding my friend meaning that they are traits that exert a significant effect in my overall impression of him (Asch, 1946). Because these traits are so important to me, they are even more significant when challenged.

Therefore, upon hearing about his actions I could not believe it. My friend was not one to make decisions such as these lightly. This made me question, how did he end up acting this way when it seemed like such a bad decision? It is easy to see how I would assume that he would not act in such as way because my previous experience with this friend would make me think that he would act in a more responsible manner. For quite some time, I questioned the tale's legitimacy (I heard about it through another friend) as it was not in line with the traits I currently associated with my friend. Even as I became convinced that it was true, I twisted the details to make it consistent with what I thought of my friend such as, “oh, he only let her do that because he was worried for her safety.” In time, I finally had to accept that it happened just as it was told to me, but importantly, I initially strongly resisted the actual sequence of events and all the relevant information.

In sum, I associated a certain way of behaving for my friend and when his behavior did not conform to my associations I resisted the truth of his behavior actually occurring. In the end, his relationship with this girl got all worked out, don't worry. But seriously, it was complicated.

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

Bruner, J. S., & Tagiuri, R. (1954). Person perception. In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 634-654). Reading, MA: Addision-Wesley.

Schneider, D. J. (1973). Implicit personality theory: A review. Psychological Bulletin, 79, 294-309.

Sedikides, C., & Anderson, C. A. (1994). Causal perceptions of intertrait relations: The glue that holds person types together. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 294-302.