Implicit Personality Theory

History and Overview

Bruner and Tagiuri (1954) wrote the first major review of research on how people perceive the personalities of others.

They introduced the term “naive, implicit personality theory” to describe the possibility that perceivers drew connections between the attributes of other people (Schneider, 1973). This idea spread quickly.

At the time, other psychologists such as Jones (1954), Steiner (1954), and Kelly (1955) described similar phenomena.

Perhaps the most notable instance of implicit personality theory entering modern psychology in the 1950s was Lee Cronbach’s notion of “the generalized other” (Cronbach, 1955). The idea endured.

In Cronbach’s view, the “other” contained a person’s beliefs about the attributes and abilities a typical person had, along with how these attributes and abilities are interrelated.

Cronbach believed that people’s theories about attributes and abilities placed these qualities into a few key categories. The categories were broad.

Different researchers reached different conclusions about the major dimensions of personality.

Common categories included divisions between good and bad traits, social skill and inadequacy, and intellectually gifted and undistinguished. Others included active vs. passive, friendly vs. unfriendly, dominant vs. submissive, and accepting vs. rejecting authority (Dunning, 1995).

There are two main traditions in implicit personality theory.

• The first tradition is concerned with the role that bias has in how people make judgments about others.
• The second is concerned with individual differences in how people perceive others (Schneider, 1973).

Judgments About Others

Psychologists have often debated whether implicit personality theories reflect reality or distort it.

Take leadership and dominance. When people associate the two, are they reflecting the real social world, or assuming a link that is not actually supported by evidence (Dunning, 1995)?

Overall, research finds that implicit personality tends to mirror reality but overstate it.

Many people overestimate how strongly traits relate, when in reality they are merely somewhat related (Dunning, 1995).

This exaggeration is old news.

Research showing that perceivers inflate the size of relationships among traits dates back to the 1920s (Newcomb, 1931; Thorndike, 1920; Schneider, 1973).

Scientists studying bias in how people judge others have compared person perception and impression formation to many other judgment phenomena (Bruner, Shapiro, and Tagiuri, 1958; Wishner, 1960; Schneider, 1973).

Usually, they look at the psychology of human judgment and the biases built into language itself (Schneider, 1973).

Individual Differences

Meanwhile, researchers concerned with individual differences have tended to focus on other topics.

These include how factors such as authoritarianism, “The New Look,” personality measurement, and personality construct theory contribute to how biases vary from person to person (Schneider, 1973).

Bruner and Tagiuri originally used the term implicit personality theory to describe assumed relationships between traits. This mattered later. The term broadened into a fuller conception of classic personality theory: a set of assumptions about why people behave the way they do (Schneider, 1973).

Cronbach (1955), for example, painted a view of implicit personality theory as more than relationships among traits.

Cronbach also described a so-called “lay theory of personality.” This covers the average strength and variability of each trait, and the likelihood that other traits occur alongside it (Schneider, 1973).

Examples

Gender Stereotypes

There have been a number of studies seeking to obtain lists of “male” and “female” traits. Hamilton (1981) argued that gender stereotypes derive from implicit personality theories.

Hamilton rephrased implicit personality theory as being about observed traits and relationships linked together in a cognitive structure. The framing stuck.

For example, someone might say a man got a poor grade on an art assignment because “men are not artistically inclined.” That statement links a non-personality trait (gender) to a personality trait (artistic inclination).

Perceived Riskiness of Sexual Partners

Williams et al. (1992), in their study of 308 university students, showed that many students used implicit personality theories to judge the riskiness of potential sexual partners.

Students discussed this in focus groups. Researchers asked when they would or would not use condoms during sex.

Partners whom college students knew and liked were not perceived as risky. This included monogamous partners who had not been tested for HIV, even when students had no real information about that person’s HIV status.

Students instead linked risky partners to superficial cues. These included dressing provocatively, being met in a bar, being older than most students, coming from a large city, or seeming overly anxious about sex (Williams et al., 1992).

This shows implicit personality theories can shape real health decisions, not just abstract social judgments.

IPTs Based on Names

Our names form part of the central core of our self-image and can shape others’ expectations of us (Harari & McDavid, 1973).

Christenfeld and Larsen (2008) identify several documented ways names bias person perception.

• Alphabetical position: surnames near the start of the alphabet can carry subtle advantages over surnames near the end, for example in author-order credit.
• Rarity and connotation: rare names, unusual spellings, and names stereotypically linked to a particular ethnic or class background tend to be judged less favorably.

Disentangling nature from nurture here is genuinely difficult. Still, the pattern across these findings suggests names do shape, in some ways, the social fate of their bearers (Christenfeld & Larsen, 2008).

A striking real-world demonstration comes from clinical diagnosis itself.

Physical Appearance and the Attractiveness Stereotype

A further class of implicit personality theory infers what someone is like psychologically from physical appearance alone.

Allport (1954) catalogued widely held but entirely unfounded beliefs of this kind: that fat people are jolly, that a high forehead signals superior intelligence, and that redheads have fiery tempers. These beliefs are false.

The best-known version is the attractiveness stereotype, often summarized as “what is beautiful is good.” Dion tested this directly.

In a classic study, Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972) had participants rate photographs of physically attractive, average, and unattractive strangers. They rated them on a range of personality and life-outcome traits, with no other information available.

Attractive individuals were rated as having more socially desirable personalities, holding more prestigious jobs, and living happier, more fulfilling lives than average- or unattractive-looking targets. The results were striking.

This was despite participants having no real evidence about any of these targets’ personalities or life circumstances at all.

Structures of Implicit Personality Theories

Trait Centrality

Asch’s (1946) research into impression formation has greatly influenced implicit personality theory and methodology. One of Asch’s concerns was trait centrality. Asch found that warm-cold was a central trait in several contexts.

Not everyone accepted this explanation.

Asch himself never fully explained when a trait is or is not central, or why central traits exist at all (Schneider, 1973). Two rival traditions emerged to address this gap.

The first was based on a so-called “correlational model,” and the second on a model of “trait implication.”

Wishner (1960) took the correlational approach.

He argued that the response traits most affected by the shift from warm to cold were also the traits that already correlated most highly with warm and cold.

By Wishner’s logic, any trait can become a central stimulus trait if it correlates highly enough with response traits.

Much of the research in the Wishner school has focused on linguistic biases in trait ratings (e.g., D’Andrade, 1965).

The debate continued for decades.

The other school of thought around trait centrality deals with scaling.

Hays (1958), for example, believed traits were central to the extent that they implied other traits without being implied by them.

Context clearly mattered.

For example, fitness could be a central trait if it implied fastidiousness and energy, but fastidiousness and energy did not necessarily imply fitness.

Irritability, meanwhile, would not be a central trait if it implied anger, since anger also implied irritability.

This was a genuine puzzle.

Research has found that warm-cold is, as Asch suspected, a central trait: the two lie at opposite ends of social evaluation (Friendly and Glucksberg, 1970).

Rosenberg et al. (1968) argued that traits sitting at the extremes of two dimensions, such as warm-cold, are more central than traits that are less extreme on that dimension.

Their model is a genuine structural rival to Asch’s account. Using multidimensional scaling of trait-rating data, they found that lay impressions of personality reduce efficiently to just two broad dimensions.

• Social good-bad: covering traits like warm, sociable, and popular.
• Intellectual good-bad: covering traits like intelligent, skilful, and industrious.

Warm-cold itself sits almost entirely on the social dimension.

This reproduces the same warm-cold pattern Asch found, but without needing his gestalt “reorganization” mechanism at all.

The debate stayed open.

Similarly, Zanna and Hamilton (1972) showed that varying a target’s position on the warm-cold dimension changes whether that person is later labeled with socially desirable or undesirable traits.

The same study also found that varying how industrious or lazy someone seemed shaped whether they were later rated as intellectually desirable or undesirable (Schneider, 1973).

Weight clearly mattered.

However, these models fail to address the weighting of each trait at the extreme of each dimension. For example, is warmness less correlated with socially desirable traits than coldness is with socially undesirable ones?

The question stayed open.

Hamilton and Huffman (1971) showed that in judgments of likability and evaluation, negative traits have a higher weight than positive ones.

Researchers have also noted that traits that are more general or abstract tend to have stronger implications than less general traits.

Abstraction counted too.

Hinkel, for example, had participants generate 10 “subordinate” constructs and 10 “superordinate” constructs.

• Subordinate: the most specific category of an idea, such as a pear in one’s hand or one’s pet dog.
• Superordinate: the most general category, one that controls many other ideas.

The pattern was consistent.

Hinkel found that the superordinate constructs were more often thought to cause traits than the subordinate constructs.

Additive Models

Another issue from Asch’s paper was his emphasis on additive versus non-additive processing of information (Schneider, 1973).

Asch disagreed with additive models.

He opposed the idea that an impression of another person is simply the addition of separate traits. Instead, he argued that the traits someone has combine to create an impression that looks different for every new set of stimuli (Asch, 1946).

Occupation mattered too.

Newer models have found that certain variables greatly influence trait relationships, such as the occupation of the person whose traits are being assessed. For example, there was a significant inverse correlation between awareness and unhappiness among lecturers and a slightly positive one for road sweepers (Veness, 1969).

Over a quarter of the correlations in Veness’ study differed significantly for different occupations (Schneider, 1973).

Cognitive Complexity

The last issue in the structure of implicit personality theory concerns cognitive complexity: the number of independent dimensions a person spontaneously uses when judging others.

Some people assess the relationships between traits on more dimensions than others.

• Cognitively simple perceivers: rely on fewer, more global dimensions, often reducible to a single good-bad judgment.
• Cognitively complex perceivers: differentiate people along several independent dimensions at once.

Complexity is not fixed.

Many researchers, such as Crockett (1965) and Schroder, Driver, and Streufert (1967), have related complexity to impression formation processes.

In particular, these researchers have focused on individual differences in complexity.

Researchers such as Pedersen (1965) and Walters and Jackson (1966) have found individual differences in the number of dimensions used for trait complications, but only subtle and minor ones.

The differences were small.

In general, researchers have considered high relationships among traits to indicate low complexity (few dimensions traits are correlated with) and low relationships to indicate high complexity.

Zajonc (1960) and Cohen (1961) investigated cognitive tuning. They showed that information was related in a more complex fashion when participants expected to receive rather than communicate the information.

Still, other researchers have found that when participants make a choice among people, they generally hold a more positive set of trait assumptions for the person they have chosen.

This bias runs deep.

This halo effect (the tendency for one known trait to color judgments of a person’s other, unrelated traits) can be increased by caffeine arousal. Decision importance matters too (O’Neal and Mills, 1969; O’Neal, 1971).

These researchers have attributed the halo effect to a person’s desire to be certain in their choosing another person.

People can create illusions of certainty in this situation by decreasing the complexity of trait relationships (Schneider, 1973).

Certainty felt safer.

Different types of stimuli can also trigger greater complexity, meaning a lower correlation between traits.

For instance, Crockett (1965) discusses unpublished studies by Nidorf and Supnick.

The pattern was consistent.

They found that information seeking and descriptions are less complex both for people very different from the participant making the judgment and for those who are highly disliked.

Meanwhile, Koltuv (1962) found that the correlations between traits were higher for those that participants did not know than those that they did.

Familiarity changed things.

When people have more information about how a person is likely to act, they are less likely to make assumptions about their traits (Schneider, 1973).

Measurement of Trait Relationships

Classic personality theories often attempt to find dynamic and causal relationships between traits.

Researchers have done this in different ways, but the process usually follows the same five steps:

1. Assign traits: to the “objects” being judged.
2. Build a trait matrix: a table of ratings across traits and objects.
3. Interpret relationships: in that matrix.
4. Reduce the matrix: to a simpler, more basic structure.
5. Interpret the result: to draw conclusions about how traits cluster.

Assignment of traits

Many researchers in implicit personality theory begin by having several perceivers assign traits to stimulus objects.

Stimulus objects can either be people (such as through a picture of a person making certain facial expressions) or physical objects; however, people are more common.

Usually, researchers ask these perceivers to give each stimulus person a rating for how strong the particular trait is in this stimulus object. This creates a matrix of trait ratings based on the perceiver, trait, and stimulus person.

The trait matrix

This trait matrix can be used to calculate correlations among traits across stimulus people.

Often, however, studies rely on how similar participants rate certain traits to be (Messick and Kogan, 1966; Pedersen, 1965; Schneider, 1973). Other studies instead use ratings of how likely certain traits are to co-occur. Both approaches are common.

Other studies, such as those of Rosenberg (Rosenberg, Nelson, and Vivekananthan, 1968; Rosenberg and Olshan, 1970), take a different approach.

Participants divide a total sample of traits into piles, with each pile representing a distinct person. This is laborious work.

The researchers then give trait disassociation scores, which depend on the number of participants who disagree on whether two traits go together (Schneider, 1973).

After gathering a list of correlations between traits, researchers must determine how to make the data interpretable. This can be done through a variety of mathematical methods (Schneider, 1973). The method matters.

When researchers aim to study how individual implicit personality theories differ, it may be important to determine how different groups of people see relationships between traits.

For example, women may see confidence as associated with both competence and warmth, while men may see confidence as merely correlated with competence.

Stimulus People

Several studies into implicit personality theory have investigated the stimulus person. In such studies, researchers attempt to obtain judgments of similarity among a variety of stimulus persons.

For example, Jackson, Messick, and Solly (1957) had participants rate how similar they were to each other, and Messick (1961) scaled similarity judgments of political figures. Methods varied widely. Wiggins and Hoffman (1968) took a third approach, having participants compare profiles representing stimulus persons.

Scientists can interpret these ratings — determine how the stimulus person’s personality compares to ratings of traits that participants thought them to have — in various ways.

For example, researchers could either use a public figure (whose personality traits are already known) or administer a personality test to the stimulus person.

The Situation

Individuals’ situations, roles, and so on can also be scaled to determine similarity and correlation between traits.

Many researchers have recognized the role of the situation in the perception of behavior (Hastorf, Schneider, and Polefka, 1970), biasing personality judgments toward one’s correlated with one’s role.

For example, a dancer may be seen as socially graceful and a tax collector as ruthless.

Critical Evaluation

Implicit personality theories let us describe someone’s whole personality after the briefest exposure. That same shortcut is exactly what makes first impressions unreliable, trading accuracy for cognitive economy.

The sections below examine how well these snap judgments hold up against people’s real traits, and a live theoretical debate over what actually makes a trait “central.”

Realism

Research as far back as Thorndike’s (1920) halo effect has shown that the perceived relationships that people see between traits differ significantly from empirical relationships.

The distortion was systematic, not random.

There has also been considerable research examining how implicit personality theory can exist independently of people’s subjective experiences.

Levy and Dugan (1960), for example, used 15 traits and measured how often each was used to describe photographs.

Three researchers found that people often attempted to correlate the same traits with the same pictures.

The pattern repeated.

Mulaik (1964), meanwhile, asked different groups of participants to rate real people and stereotypical roles.

Similarly, Mulaik found that people often rated real people and stereotypical roles in a similar but not identical way.

Nonetheless, many studies have findings contradicting this early research (e.g., Lay and Jackson, 1969).

Chapman (1967) showed a related bias.

Observers report a correlation between two traits that is stronger than the true correlation, whenever the two are already linked in memory or language.

This is called illusory correlation.

All in all, these findings suggest that perceived trait relationships deviate from what researchers have calculated the “true” relationships between traits to be.

Language and Implicit Personality Theory

Many scholars have claimed that implicit personality theories are determined by linguistics. Kuusinen (1969), for example, showed that the differential ratings of trait names create a linguistic structure similar to the structure for other concepts.

The idea is controversial, though.

One of the biggest controversies around linguistic factors as a basis for implicit personality theory involves the fact that traits have both denotations and connotations.

For example, Walters and Jackson (1966) demonstrated that some personality factors are characterized by high ratings of interpersonal warmth and sociability.

This felt paradoxical.

The complication is that all socially desirable terms tend to be associated with interpersonal warmth too (Schneider, 1973).

Researchers have tried to block out linguistic dimensions in a way that avoids this loading.

Peabody tackled this directly.

Peabody (1967), for example, organized traits into groups of four so that they would be paired with traits that have opposite evaluative and meaning dimensions.

This meant Peabody would pair a trait such as cautious with one that meant the same thing but carried an opposite evaluation, such as timid.

The logic was careful.

He would also pair it with two traits of similar descriptive meaning but opposite evaluation, one positive (e.g., bold) and one negative (e.g., rash).

The design was elegant.

He then asked subjects to make inferences from various traits on scales consisting of a positive trait and its negative descriptive opposite (e.g., cautious-rash or timid-bold).

Peabody showed that most inferences people made were descriptive rather than evaluative.

However, others, such as Rosenberg and Olshan (1970), have criticized Peabody’s research, arguing that Peabody’s traits obscured the evaluative dimension of implicit personality theory (Felipe, 1970).

Contemporary Research

More recent research has tackled three questions: how automatic trait inference really is, whether culture shapes it, and how accurate appearance-based judgments actually are.

How Automatic Is Trait Inference?

A large literature since the 1980s has argued that people draw trait inferences from someone’s behavior spontaneously, without ever intending to form an impression.

Until recently, though, this evidence had never been combined into one estimate.

Does Culture Shape Implicit Trait Beliefs?

Church et al. (2005) compared implicit trait beliefs across a large sample from the United States and Mexico.

The basic structure of these beliefs held up well in both cultures.

This part was universal.

Americans leaned more on trait-based explanations of behavior, while Mexican participants leaned more on situational ones (Church et al., 2005).

Trait inference itself may be close to universal, but how much weight it gets still varies with culture.

How Accurate Are Face-Based Judgments?

Todorov et al. (2015) reviewed decades of research on trait judgments made from faces alone.

Perceivers agree strongly on traits such as trustworthiness and competence within a fraction of a second of seeing a face.

The effect was fast.

These snap judgments even predict real-world outcomes, including investment decisions and election results.

The review’s key finding, though, is that face-based judgments are a poor guide to what a person is actually like: agreement is strong, but accuracy is weak.

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Williams, S. S., Kimble, D. L., Covell, N. H., Weiss, L. H., Newton, K. J., Fisher, J. D., & Fisher, W. A. (1992). College Students Use Implicit Personality Theory Instead of Safer Sex 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 22(12), 921-933.

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Further Reading

• Schneider, D. J. (1973). Implicit personality theory: A review. Psychological bulletin, 79(5), 294.