Navigating the Social Environment: Linking Motivations, Impressions, and Behaviors Via Sampling Approach

Abstract

Our current understanding of impression formation is based on experiments in which participants have no control over the information they receive. This limits the ecological realism of experimental situations upon which scientific claims are based. We present a research paradigm that gives participants control over the information search by allowing them to collect their own information samples. The present work investigates how people explore the social environment and how the sampled information informs the impressions that people form. Four experiments tested theoretically driven predictions related to information sampling patterns under interested and disinterested information search targeting the trustworthiness of several social targets. Under interested information search, we documented the early truncation of the sampling of social targets that showed untrustworthy behavior early on. Under disinterested information search, participants sampled the social targets more extensively and systematically, avoiding small sample biases. Our experiments further show that, once obtained, the sampled information accurately determines the final impression. Moreover, we document a direct link between the sampled information and subsequent behaviors consisting of trustworthiness predictions and choosing a partner with whom to play a trust game. By investigating the emergence of trustworthiness impressions by means of sampling, the present research informs two lines of research, the origins of trustworthiness and sampling accounts of judgment and decision-making.