Language and person cognition: Effects of communicative set on trait attribution.

Abstract

People may be especially prone to construe an individual's behavior in terms of global traits when they anticipate verbal communication about that person. In a first experiment, subjects expecting to communicate their impressions of a target person generated a greater number of global trait descriptions and made a greater number of unqualified, mutually consistent trait attributions than did control subjects. Three further experiments tested the hypotheses that (a) the specifically verbal nature of the anticipated communication at least partly accounts for this effect and (b) expecting to receive a verbal communication may suffice to produce the effect as well. Both hypotheses received support: Subjects expecting either to transmit or to receive verbal impressions ascribed more traits to the target person, and were more influenced by their implicit personality theory in rating the target's dispositions, than subjects expecting to transmit impressions nonverbally .

Motivation and Cognition in Social Life: A Social Survival Perspective

“…Furthermore, compared to listeners, speakers try to convey only relevant information (Higgins, Fondacaro, & McCann, 1981; see same for a more detailed discussion of speaker and listener roles). Similarly, when social perceivers expect to have to explain something to other people, they adopt a focused search for meaning; they form more fixed, polarized, organized, and categoryoriented impressions than people expecting to receive information (e.g., Cohen, 1961;Hoffman, Mischel, & Baer, 1984;Zajonc, 1960).…”

The intuitive personologist and the individual differences model

“…As a matter of fact, in power contexts, evaluations are most often embedded in communicationsfor instance in an hierarchical communication network -and are meant for social transmission. Now, it has sometimes been shown that the activity of psychological description mobilizes the traits proposed by the personological lexis all the more easily if performed in a communication setting (Hoffman, Mischel and Baer, 1984). We therefore wondered whether the IDM could not be enhanced if subjects were experimentally placed in a set oriented towards the communication of psychological judgments, i.e.…”

Communication and Essentialism: Grounding the Shared Reality of a Social Category

“…Provided that there is already a spontaneous cognitive tendency to make dispositional inferences while just planning to communicate (Hoffmann et al, 1984), elaborate grounding could facilitate their cognitive rehearsal, elaboration, and bolstering along the relevant trait dimension, and this can produce a moderate level of relationship between grounding and dispositional attribution. However, it is intriguing to consider the following possibility.…”

“…In Zajonc's (1960) cognitive tuning work, those who anticipated to communicate about a target person were shown to construct a more coherent impression about the target than those who expected to receive a communication. Subsequent research showed that senders were more likely than receivers to make trait inferences spontaneously (e.g., Hoffmann, Mischel, & Baer, 1984) and make stronger dispositional attributions to the target person (e.g., Harvey, Harkins, & Kagehiro, 1976; for a review, see Guerin & Innes, 1989). In this article, we will call polarization the tendency to make more extreme dispositional judgments about a target when strong dispositional attributions are made on a bipolar dimension anchored by two contrasted traits (e.g., kind vs. unkind).…”