The representation of actors in social judgments

Tracie Lynne Stewart, Purdue University

Abstract

Four experiments investigated conditions under which representations of social judgments incorporate actors with behaviors and inferred traits. In all 4 experiments, participants made numerous social judgments about behaviors presented with photos of actors. For all experiments, repeated behaviors were judged more quickly when paired with the same rather than a new actor. This finding suggests that actors were processed with the first trait judgment, allowing the repeated social judgment to optimally cue the initial representation. The match between initial representation and repeated judgment allowed the second judgment to be made more quickly. Less facilitation occurred for repeated behaviors paired with new actors, because the second presentation did not optimally match the initial actor-behavior representation. Experiment 1 demonstrated more response time facilitation for repeated behaviors paired with the same rather than different photos on a social judgment task requiring participants to indicate whether the persons in the photos looked like the "type of people" who would perform particular behaviors. This strong manipulation of context is a context beta paradigm. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and introduced a minimal group manipulation to assess whether participants were more likely to integrate representations of actors who were ingroup members with social judgments about the actors. However, this manipulation had no effect. Experiments 3 and 4 employed a context alpha manipulation of context, which did not require participants to attend to the photo to complete the social judgment task. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to judge whether a behavior presented with a photo was either friendly or intelligent. In Experiment 4, the social judgment task was to assess whether the person in the photo was either friendly or intelligent, given that the person had performed a particular behavior. Experiment 4 also examined the hypothesis that participants would process actors more strongly with social judgments when prior impressions had been formed of the actors. This hypothesis was confirmed.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Smith, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Social psychology|Psychology|Experiments

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