When people hear or read a description of a person, it appears that some aspects of that description influence their first impressions more than others.

Solomon Asch, one of the pioneers in the study of impression formation, discovered that changing a single word in a list of traits dramatically influences a person’s initial impressions of another person, especially if the word was a central trait such as “warm” or “cold.”

In Asch’s study, hypothetical individuals whose trait list contained “warm” were rated more favorably overall than those whose trait list contained “cold,” even if all the other traits were identical. Asch proposed that these central traits such as these had a special influence on impression formation because they suggested the presence of other traits.