The trait coding of behavior

Rodin, Miriam J.

doi:10.3758/bf03337592

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Some qualities of experience are more easily (and usefully) represented linguistically than are others; whether or not linguistic coding will facilitate thinking in a given situation depends primarily on whether the relevant stimulus attributes also happen to be the ones that are linguistically codable. Likewise, the use of verbal trait categories to code (or recode) complex human behavior necessarily results in informational losses as well as gains (e.g., Hoffman et al, 1981;Monson et al, 1982;Rodin, 1972Rodin, , 1975, whose significance depends crucially on such considerations as one's purpose in the particular situation (Mischel, 1979). The present research supports the hypothesis that anticipated verbal communication stimulates the trait categorization process-presumably with both the positive and negative consequences that such processing entails.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

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

Hoffman¹,

Mischel²,

Baer³

1984

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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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 .

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