13.1 Forming Impressions of Other People

One of social psychology’s pioneers, Fritz Heider (1958), pointed out long ago that human beings are natural psychologists—or naïve psychologists, to use his term; we are practitioners of folk psychology, how people “naturally” come to understand the psychological world. Heider contended that humans are naturally interested in assessing the personality characteristics and attitudes of other humans they encounter. From an evolutionary perspective, this drive to understand others has clear adaptive functions. Other people can help us or hurt us in our life endeavors. Understanding others helps us predict their behavior and decide how to interact with them. Consistent with Heider’s general view, researchers have found that people untrained in psychology are nonetheless often remarkably accurate and quick at assessing others’ personalities by observing their behavior (Ambady et al., 2000; Carney et al., 2007).

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In what sense are people natural psychologists?

Yet, as Heider himself pointed out, the accuracy of our judgments of others sometimes suffers from certain consistent mistakes, or biases. These biases occur most often when we are not using our full mental resources, or have only limited information with which to reason, or have unconscious motives for reaching particular conclusions. Such biases interest social psychologists for two reasons. First, they provide clues about the mental processes that contribute to accurate as well as inaccurate perceptions and judgments. In this regard, social psychologists’ interest in biases is analogous to perceptual psychologists’ interest in visual illusions, which (as discussed in Chapter 8) provide clues to understanding normal, accurate visual perception. Second, an understanding of biases can promote social justice. By helping people understand the psychological tendencies that contribute to prejudice and unfair treatment of other people, social-psychological findings can help people overcome such biases.

Making Attributions from Observed Behavior

Is it the person or the situation? When we see someone behaving in a certain way, or expressing a particular emotion, we may attribute the behavior or emotion primarily to something unique about the person or to something about the situation. Here, we would need more information before making a confident judgment.
Petar Chernaev/E+/Getty Images

Actions are directly observable, and thoughts are not. Therefore, our judgments about the personalities of people we encounter are based largely on what we observe of their actions. As “naïve psychologists” we intuitively, in our everyday experiences, form impressions of people’s personalities on the basis of their actions.

For example, if a new acquaintance smiles at you, you do not simply register the fact that she smiled; rather, you interpret the smile’s meaning and use that interpretation to infer something about her personality. Depending on the context, the precise form of the smile, and any prior information you have about her, you might decide that the smile represents friendliness, or smugness, or guile. What you carry away from the encounter is not so much a memory that the person smiled as a memory that she was friendly, smug, or deceitful. That memory is added to your growing impression of her and may affect—fairly or unfairly—your future interactions with her.

Any such judgment about another person is, in essence, a claim about causation. It is an implicit claim that the person’s behavior is caused in part by some more or less permanent characteristic of the person, such as friendliness or deceitfulness. In common English usage, any claim about causation is called an attribution. In the study of person perception, an attribution is a claim about the cause of someone’s behavior. As Heider (1958) pointed out, we naturally make judgments about others’ personalities on the basis of their behavior, but for these judgments to be meaningful we must distinguish actions that tell us something lasting and unique about the person from those that do not.

The Logic of Attributing Behavior to the Person or the Situation

If you see a man running and screaming and then see that a tiger is chasing him, you might logically attribute his fear to the situation rather than to any special aspect of his personality; almost anyone would be afraid of a loose and charging tiger. To build a useful picture of a person on the basis of his or her actions, you must decide which actions imply something unique about the person and which actions would be expected of anyone under similar circumstances. Heider noted that when behavior is clearly appropriate to the environmental situation, people commonly attribute the behavior to the situation rather than to the behaving person’s personality.

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According to Kelley’s logical model, when should behavior be attributed to the person and when should it be attributed to the situation?

In line with Heider’s general ideas about attributions, Harold Kelley (1967, 1973) developed a logical model for judging whether a particular action should be attributed to some characteristic of the acting person or to something about the immediate environment. The essence of the model is that we consider three questions in making an attribution:

  1. Does this person regularly behave this way in this situation? If the answer is yes, we have grounds for attributing the behavior to some stable characteristic of either the person or the situation. If the answer is no, then this particular instance of the behavior may be a fluke that tells us little about either the person or the situation.
  2. Do many other people regularly behave this way in this situation? If the answer is yes, we have grounds for attributing the behavior more to the situation than to the person. If the answer is no, then this behavior may tell us something unique about the person.
  3. Does this person behave this way in many other situations? If the answer is yes, we have grounds for making a relatively general claim about the personality of the observed person. If the answer is no, then any personality claim we make about the person is limited to the particular situation.

As an illustration, imagine that we are caught in a traffic jam and Susan, our driver, is expressing a great deal of anger. Does her anger tell us something useful about her as a person? If we have observed that Susan regularly gets very angry in traffic jams (yes to Question 1) and that most other people don’t get so angry in traffic jams (no to Question 2), then we might appropriately attribute her anger to something about her as a person. Given these answers to Questions 1 and 2, our answer to Question 3 will allow us to assess the generality of the personality attribute we can reasonably infer. If Susan also gets very angry in many other situations (yes to Question 3), we might logically conclude that she is an easily angered person, and we should be careful around her in all situations. Conversely, if Susan rarely gets angry in other situations (no to Question 3), a reasonable conclusion would be that she is not generally an angry person but just cannot tolerate traffic jams.

Notice that there is nothing surprising in this model. It is simply a statement of the logic that you or I or anyone else—with sufficient motivation and information—would use in deciding whether or not an observed bit of behavior tells us something interesting about the person. It states explicitly the logic that leads us to conclude that a man’s repeated fearful reaction to puppies and housecats tells us more about the man than does his fearful reaction to a loose and raging tiger.

Not surprisingly, a number of research studies have shown that when people are asked to explain the cause of a particular behavior and are given sufficient information to answer the three questions, they usually do make attributions that accord with the model just described (McArthur, 1972). But often people lack the information, the time, or the motivation to make a logical attribution. In that case they may take shortcuts in their reasoning, which may result in certain consistent errors, or biases.

The Person Bias in Attributions

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What evidence supports the existence of a person bias in attributions?

In his original writings about attribution, Heider (1958) noted that people tend to give too much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situation when they make attributions about others’ actions. In our example of Susan and the traffic jam, people tend to ignore the traffic jam as cause and to attribute Susan’s anger too heavily to her personality. Many researchers have confirmed the existence of this person bias in attribution.

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Some of the most dramatic examples of the person bias occur in situations in which a person is socially pressured or required to behave in a certain way. In one experiment, for example, college students listened to a student who was assigned to read a political statement written by someone else (Gilbert & Jones, 1986). Even when the assignment was made by the observers themselves, so they could be sure that the reader had not chosen it himself, observers tended to rate the reader as politically liberal when the statement he read was liberal and as politically conservative when the statement was conservative. Although there was no logical reason to assume that the statement had anything to do with the reader’s own political beliefs, the students made that attribution. Similar effects occur in judgments of the personalities of actors. In another experiment, people who saw an actor play the part of a kind person judged the actor himself as more kindly than did others who saw that same actor play the part of a villain (Tal-Or & Papirman, 2007).

Is she a careless person, or just having a moment of distraction? According to the person bias (or fundamental attribution error), people tend to attribute other people’s behavior to a trait, or disposition, whereas they are more likely to attribute their own behavior to the context.
© Lew Robertson/Corbis

Other research has shown that a person’s social role can have undue effects on the attributions that others make about that person. When we observe a police officer, nurse, teacher, or student carrying out his or her duties, we tend—in accord with the person bias—to attribute the action to the individual’s personality and to ignore the constraints that the role places on how the person can or must act. We might develop quite different impressions of the same person if we saw him or her in out-of-role situations.

In one experiment demonstrating this effect of roles, Ronald Humphrey (1985) set up a simulated corporate office and randomly assigned some volunteer subjects to the role of manager and others to that of clerk. The managers were given interesting tasks and responsibilities, and the clerks were given routine, boring tasks. At the end of the study, the subjects rated various aspects of the personalities of all subjects, including themselves. Compared with those in the clerk role, those in the manager role were judged by others more positively; they were rated higher in leadership, intelligence, assertiveness, supportiveness, and likelihood of future success. In keeping with the person bias, the subjects apparently ignored the fact that the role assignment, which they knew was random, had allowed one group to manifest characteristics that the other group could not. The bias did not hold when the subjects rated themselves, but it did hold when they rated others who had been assigned to the same role as themselves.

A recent analysis suggests that the CEOs of large corporations in the United States are overrated, and overpaid, in part because of the person bias (Kolev, 2008). Corporate decision makers attribute too much of the success or failure of a company to the most visible individual representative of the company—the CEO—and tend to ignore all of the other factors that influence the company’s success or failure, such as the general state of the economy at the time. Because of the person bias, they are willing to pay top dollar to attract or retain the “best” CEO available.

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Why is the person bias often called the “fundamental attribution error”? In what conditions does the bias most often occur?

By the mid-1970s so much evidence had appeared to support the person bias that Lee Ross (1977) called it the fundamental attribution error, a label designed to signify the pervasiveness and strength of the bias and to suggest that it underlies many other social-psychological phenomena. That label is still in use despite growing evidence that the bias may not be as fundamental as Ross and others thought (Uleman et al., 2008). People are much more likely to make this error if their minds are occupied by other tasks or if they are tired than if they devote their full attention to the task (Gilbert, 1989). Also, in many cases, the apparent demands of the experiment may artificially produce the person bias. Research subjects who are told that their task is to judge someone’s personality are much more likely to exhibit the person bias than are those who are asked to explain the observed behavior in whatever terms they wish (Malle, 2006; Malle et al., 2000).

A Cross-Cultural Difference in Attributions

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What logic and evidence suggest that the person bias may be a product of Western culture and may not exist in Eastern cultures?

Prior to the 1980s, social-psychological studies of attributions had been conducted only in Western cultures, mostly in North America and Western Europe. This observation led some to suggest that the person bias in attributions might be a product of a predominantly Western way of thinking. Western philosophies, religions, and political ideologies tend to emphasize the idea that people are in charge of their own destinies, so people growing up in Western cultures may learn to attribute behavior more to the person than to the situation (Jellison & Green, 1981). If so, then in Eastern cultures—such as those of India, China, and Japan, where philosophies and religions emphasize the role of fate or circumstances in controlling one’s destiny—people might make relatively fewer person attributions and more situation attributions.

Figure 13.1: Cultural difference in making attributions When asked to explain another person’s behavior, the proportion of attributions to internal disposition (personality or attitude) was greater among people in the United States than it was among Hindus in India, and this difference was greater for adults than for children. (The proportions were determined by dividing the number of person attributions by the total number of person plus situation attributions for each group. Data from Miller, 1984.)

To test this theory, Joan Miller (1984) asked middle-class children and adults in the United States and in a Hindu community in India to think of an action by someone they knew and then to explain why the person had acted in that way. As predicted, the Americans made more attributions to personality and fewer to the situation than did the Indians. This difference was greater for adults—who would presumably incorporate cultural norms more strongly—than it was for children (see Figure 13.1).

In the years since Miller’s pioneering work, similar results have been found in dozens of studies comparing attributions made by people raised in North America with those raised in various Far Eastern countries, including China, Japan, and Korea (Lehman et al., 2004; Norenzayan & Nisbett, 2000). Although there are many possible reasons for this cultural difference (language, genes), Michael Varnum and his colleagues (2010) argue that the most likely explanation is social orientation. That is, Western cultures emphasize personal independence whereas Eastern cultures emphasize greater interdependence among people.

Effects of Facial Features on Person Perceptions

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” goes the saying, but we have the saying precisely because we know that people do often judge books by their covers. Similarly, we caution ourselves against judging people by their facial features because we know that we do tend to make such judgments, often falsely and unfairly. The two most researched biases that derive from perceptions of facial features are the attractiveness bias and the baby-face bias.

The Attractiveness Bias

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How have researchers documented biasing effects of physical attractiveness on perceptions of personality?

Consistent with folktales in which the good people (the princesses and princes) are beautiful and the bad people (the witches and ogres) are ugly, experiments have shown that physically attractive people are commonly judged as more intelligent, competent, sociable, and moral than less attractive people (Dion, 2002; Langlois et al., 2000).

Luckily for them, they’re cute Researchers have found that good-looking children are less likely to be blamed for their misbehavior than are children who are not so good looking. The teacher here may be more inclined to attribute this disruptive behavior to the merriment of the situation than she would if the boys were not so cute.
Banana Stock/Jupiterimages.com

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In one experiment, fifth-grade teachers were given report cards and photographs of children whom they did not know and were asked to rate each child’s intelligence and achievement. The teachers rated physically attractive children as brighter and more successful than unattractive children with identical report cards (Clifford & Walster, 1973). In a similar experiment, adults more frequently attributed a child’s misbehavior to environmental circumstances if the child was physically attractive and to the child’s personality if the child was not attractive (Dion, 1972). In yet another study, which analyzed actual court cases, judges regularly gave longer prison sentences to unattractive persons than to attractive persons convicted of comparable crimes (Stewart, 1985).

On the brighter side, there is also evidence that judgments of personality can affect judgments of physical appearance (Zebrowitz & Rhodes, 2002). In one experiment, an instructor who behaved in a warm and friendly way to one group of students and in a cold and aloof way to another group was judged as better looking by the first group than by the second (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). There is also evidence that East Asians are less susceptible to the attractiveness bias than are Westerners (Dion, 2002). Just as they are less inclined than Westerners to judge a person’s character from a brief glimpse of the person’s behavior, they are also less inclined to judge it from the person’s physical attractiveness. Apparently, the attractiveness bias is at least partly a result of an influence of Western culture.

Figure 13.2: Correlations between ratings of physical attractiveness and IQ and perceived intelligence at five different points in the life span The high correlations between attractiveness and perceived intelligence reflect the attractiveness bias. The lower correlations between physical attractiveness and IQ show that the connection is not nearly as strong as people think, although physical attractiveness may account for about 4 percent of the individual differences in IQ.
(Based on data in Zebrowitz et al., 2002.)

But is there any evidence that more attractive people actually are more intelligent than less attractive people? Leslie Zebrowitz and her colleagues (2002) obtained archival photographs and IQ scores of people born between 1920 and 1929 who had participated in three longitudinal studies and asked a panel of judges to estimate their attractiveness and intelligence based on photos. Photographs had been taken at five different times in the life span: childhood, puberty, adolescence, mid-adulthood, and later adulthood. Figure 13.2 shows the correlations between rated attractiveness and (a) IQ and (b) perceived intelligence. As you can see, the correlations between perceived attractiveness and perceived intelligence were quite high and similar for all ages judged (median correlation = .57). The correlations with IQ, however, were much lower (median correlation = .21), although still greater than expected by chance for all but the older adults.

One explanation for the significant, though small (accounting for only about 4 percent of the individual differences in IQ) relation between IQ and physical attractiveness is the “good genes” theory. Basically, attractiveness signals “good genes,” and people have evolved to judge good-looking people as a high-quality (that is, intelligent) potential mate (Buss, 1989; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). Alternatively, facial attractiveness is related to symmetry (the right side of the face being similar to the left side), and symmetry is related to prenatal experiences—the more problems a fetus experiences, the less symmetrical his or her body is—and the less fit overall he or she can be expected to be (Furlow et al., 1997). Even if the relation between actual IQ and intelligence is reliable, it accounts for only a small portion of the variance in IQ and is significantly less than what people perceive (mostly incorrectly) the relation between attractiveness and intelligence to be.

The Baby-Face Bias

Another pervasive, although less well-known, bias concerns a person’s facial maturity. Some people, regardless of their age, have facial features that resemble those of a baby: a round rather than elongated head, a forehead protruding forward rather than sloping back, large eyes, and a small jawbone. In a series of experiments conducted in both the United States and Korea, baby-faced adults were perceived as more naïve, honest, helpless, kind, and warm than mature-faced adults of the same age and sex—even though they could tell that the baby-faced persons were not really younger (McArthur & Berry, 1987; Zebrowitz et al., 1993).

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How have researchers documented biasing effects of a babyish versus a mature-looking face? What practical consequences have been shown to result from this bias?

In one study, Leslie Zebrowitz and Susan McDonald (1991) found that the baby-face bias influenced the outcomes of actual cases in a small-claims court. Baby-faced defendants were much more frequently found innocent in cases involving intentional wrongdoing than were mature-faced defendants, but they were neither more nor less frequently found innocent in cases involving negligence (such as performing a contracted job incompetently). Apparently, judges find it hard to think of baby-faced persons as deliberately causing harm but do not find it difficult to think of them as incompetent or forgetful.

Another study, with enormous practical implications, showed that facial features play a big role in determining the results of U.S. Congressional elections. Alexander Todorov and his colleagues (2005) prepared black-and-white facial photographs of the two top candidates for each of 95 Senate races and 600 House of Representatives races taking place between the years 2000 and 2004. They showed each pair of photos for just 1 second to adult subjects who were not familiar with the candidates, asking them to judge, for each pair, which candidate looked more competent. The result was striking. The competence judgments, based on that 1-second viewing, correctly predicted the winner of 72 percent of the Senate races and 67 percent of the House races! Other evidence indicates that those judgments were probably founded primarily on assessments of facial maturity (Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2005). Apparently, people vote for the mature-faced person, who looks more competent, over the baby-faced person, who looks more naïve. Consistent with that interpretation, another research study showed that when photographs of former U.S. presidents Reagan and Kennedy were digitally altered to increase their baby-facedness, their perceived leadership qualities declined (Keating et al., 1999).

Konrad Lorenz (1943, 1971) suggested long ago that human beings intuitively respond to infants’ facial features with feelings of compassion and care, a characteristic that helps promote the survival of our offspring. He also noted that the infant-like features of some animal species (such as rabbits and pandas) lead us to perceive them as particularly cute, innocent, and needing care, regardless of the animals’ actual needs or behaviors. The work of Zebrowitz and others suggests that we generalize this response not just to babies and animals but also to adult humans whose faces resemble those of babies. We may want to cuddle and comfort the more baby-faced candidate, but we don’t choose him or her as our leader.

Possible Evolutionary Consequences of the Baby-Face Bias

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From an evolutionary perspective, how might the baby-face bias have led to the baby-faced appearance of human beings in general?

From an evolutionary perspective, it is noteworthy that human adults, overall, are much more baby-faced than the adults of our closest primate relatives. The typical adult human face looks much more like that of an infant chimpanzee than like that of an adult chimpanzee. This difference is generally attributed to the expanded cranial cavity that came with enlargement of the brain in humans. But we wonder if that is the whole explanation. In the course of human evolution, individuals who had babyish faces may have been treated more benignly than those who had more mature faces, and perhaps this helped promote our species’ evolution toward baby-facedness. This is speculation, but it is supported by evidence that baby-faced children and adolescents are less often physically abused than are those who have more mature faces (McCabe, 1984) and by evidence that baby-faced adults receive more unsolicited help from strangers than do mature-faced adults (Keating et al., 2003).

Lorenz’s initial hypothesis about the function of the baby-face bias was that it promotes caretaking of infants and young children by adults. Immature facial features may provide adults with cues regarding a child’s health and overall maturity level that in turn may influence the amount of time and resources they devote to a child. In support of this, perceptions of cuteness and attractiveness (which is associated with a greater display of immature features) are the single best predictors of the likelihood of people making hypothetical adoption decisions (Volk et al., 2007; Waller et al., 2004). In related work, mothers of less-attractive infants, on average, spent less quality time and displayed lower amounts of affection and attentiveness toward their infants compared to mothers of more-attractive infants (Langlois et al., 1995).

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Some evidence suggests that this bias toward “baby faces” is not reliably found until adolescence, with girls displaying preferences toward immature features roughly 2 years earlier than boys (Fullard & Reiling, 1976). This suggests that biases toward cues of immaturity may be related to the onset of puberty and possible parenthood. In more recent research, women in early (19–26 years) and middle (45–51 years) adulthood were more sensitive to varying levels of infant cuteness than older women (53 years and older) and males of any age (Sprengelmeyer et al., 2009). This suggests that biases toward infantile features are specific to times during development when women are more likely to find themselves in a caregiving role, possibly mediated by hormones. Adults continue to feel positively toward “baby-like” faces of preschool children. Adults’ judgments of attractiveness and likeability for children much older than 4.5 years of age, however, do not differ from their judgments of adult faces (Luo et al., 2011).

Forming Impressions on the Internet

The Internet, like the telephone before it and postal services before that, has added new dimensions to human communication. More than any other communication tool, the Internet allows people to locate and “meet” other people who have similar interests—through chat rooms, social networking sites, news groups, special-interest e-mail lists, dating services, and the like. While some research conducted in the early days of the Internet suggested that Internet use was socially detrimental, studies conducted more recently generally report positive correlations between Internet use and overall sociability and emotional well-being (Valkenburg & Peter, 2009). Here we will focus on the role of the Internet in meeting new people. Many friendships and valued acquaintanceships today involve people who first met in cyberspace. Some of these relationships remain confined to cyberspace, but in other cases Internet friends eventually meet in person, and the friendship extends into the tangible world.

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What evidence suggests that strangers who meet on the Internet like each other more than do strangers who meet in person? How might this phenomenon be explained?

In several experiments, randomly formed pairs of opposite-sex college students who did not know each other were assigned to participate in get-acquainted meetings, either on-line (through an Internet chat room) or in face-to-face encounters. The most striking general result is that those who had met on-line reported more liking of each other than did those who had met face-to-face (Bargh & McKenna, 2004). In one such experiment, this first meeting was followed by a second meeting, in which all pairs met face-to-face (McKenna et al., 2002). As you can see in Figure 13.3, the degree of liking between those who first met on the Internet increased even more in the face-to-face meeting, while the lesser degree of liking between those who first met face-to-face was not significantly affected by the second meeting.

Figure 13.3: Getting acquainted on the Internet Randomly selected opposite-sex pairs of students met for 20 minutes either on the Internet or face-to-face, and then all pairs met face-to-face for a second 20-minute period. After each meeting, subjects anonymously rated their liking of their partners using a scale in which 7 was maximal liking.
(Based on data from McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002, Study 3.)

How can such results be explained? Researchers have found that get-acquainted meetings over the Internet are more intimate, more revealing of what each person considers to be his or her “true self,” than are such meetings conducted face-to-face (Bargh & McKenna, 2004; Valkenburg & Peter, 2009). Apparently, the relative anonymity of the Internet, along with the lack of visual and auditory contact, reduces social anxiety and frees people to reveal more about themselves than they would if they met face-to-face. Also, without knowledge of the physical features of the other person, the biasing effects of attractiveness, or lack thereof, are absent. Communication is not shut down by early negative judgments or anxieties based on physical features. When and if the two partners do meet, they already know a good deal about each other and may feel something of an emotional bond, which may lead them to see each other as more attractive than they would have if they were complete strangers.

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Not only can people show their “true” selves on the Internet; they can also “try out” new identities. This happens especially during adolescence. In this context, identity can be defined as “the aspect of the self that is accessible and salient in a particular context and that interacts with the environment” (Finkenhauer et al., 2002, p. 2). Sometimes teenagers conduct identity experiments on-line, pretending to be someone they are not (Valkenburg et al., 2005). This was investigated in one study of Dutch children and adolescents ranging in age from 9 to 18 years (Valkenburg et al., 2005). The researchers asked the subjects if they had ever pretended to be someone else on-line and why. About half of the adolescents admitted to this, with “pretending” being more frequent for the younger than the older subjects (9- to 12-year-old: 72 percent; 13- to 14-year-olds: 53 percent; 15- to 18-year-olds: 28 percent). Both boys and girls admitted to some false representation on-line, with boys exaggerating their masculinity and girls pretending to be prettier and older than they really are.

Used wisely, the Internet apparently is a valuable tool for making friends. But, as is often pointed out, the Internet’s seductive nature also creates potential dangers. People can easily create false impressions of themselves over the Internet. For the sake of personal safety, the first few face-to-face meetings with an Internet acquaintance should be in a safe, public place; it is also advisable to use the Internet to verify the information a would-be friend has provided about him- or herself.

SECTION REVIEW

We are constantly forming impressions of others and judging the causes of their behavior.

Basing Attributions on Observed Behavior

  • Logically, we might attribute a person’s behavior primarily to characteristics of the person or the situation.
  • The person bias is the tendency to give undue weight to personality and not enough to the situation in making attributions.
  • The person bias is less often observed in East Asian cultures.

Effects of Physical Appearance

  • A common bias is that we tend to see physically attractive people as more intelligent, social, competent, and moral than less attractive people.
  • We tend to see baby-faced individuals as more honest, naïve, helpless, and warm—but less competent—than otherwise comparable people with mature faces. This bias may have evolved to promote caregiving of infants and young children by adults.

Forming Impressions on the Internet

  • In experiments, people who met initially on the Internet liked each other more than people who initially met face-to-face.
  • This tendency may result from people on the Internet being less anxious, more intimate, and freed from the biasing effects of physical appearance.
  • Adolescents are especially prone to conducting identity experiments on-line, pretending to be someone they are not.