Discuss theories of impression formation.

        A script is like a schema but is something more specific that we have built up about a situation and a framework that you know very well. Like the order in which things happen when you go to a restaurant. Scripts are used in the same way schemas are used; to help you use the knowledge you have to identify the correct way to behave. As scripts are much more specific it is very rare scripts you have available change however when they are broken it can be uncomfortable and can leave you confused and uncertain of what happens next and the type of behaviour you should then adapt to.  

         Central traits are traits that a person has which are most obvious, there main trait. Peripheral traits are traits which aren’t as obvious as central traits. Some psychologists believe that these kinds of traits are more important than our overall impression of them.  Asch conducted a study on impression formation in 1946 and part of his experiment focused on central and peripheral traits and which had the breater effect on impression formation. He took a list of words and placed the word ‘warm’ in the middle of the list, took the same list of words and put the word ‘cold’ in place of warm he then gave the list of words to two sets of people and gave them another list of personality traits and asked them to pick the traits they thought applied to the person whose personality traits were listed in the pervious list. He found that the group which had the list containing the word ‘warm’ picked positive words from the second list and the group which had the list which said ‘cold’ chose opposite words which were quite negative. This showed that central traits can greatly alter the way in which we perceive people.  However Asch tried the same experiment with different words ‘polite’ and ‘blunt’ and found no difference. Showing that not all words have the power to alter the way in which we perceive people.  

Asch’s study also tested whether people tended to form impressions on the first things they find out about something or the last things. He took a list of words and gave them to one set of people and put the words in reverse order and gave those two the second group and gave them both a second list of words asking them to choose traits which applied to the person the y saw in the first list. He found that the groups had again got different perceptions of the person and that the traits which were first had more affect on what the groups thought. A study done by Jones et al. in 1966 showed the opposite that recency had the most influence. They got some people to mark two sets of test papers one where the people who sat the test went from being really good to really bad and one where the opposite happened the class’s scores went from bad to good. They found that the class that went from bad to good were seen as the better class of the two when in actual fact they were the same.

In conclusion there are many ways in which we form impressions however they are not all true of every situation sometimes central traits have an effect sometimes they don’t, sometimes people turn to primacy and sometimes people turn to recency to form impression. It all depends on the situation.