This research will look at how impressions of others are formed. An analysis of any particular social event, be it juror decision making, attraction and liking, attitude formation, or stereotyping processes, involves the dynamics of person perception. This process of moving from observable behaviors to inferences about someone's underlying personality has important implications for nearly every aspect of the social world. This research looks in detail at this process of constructing impressions, at the storage of impressions in memory for use at a later point in time,and at the retrieval of these impressions for making subsequent judgments about the person. In earlier work, the researcher has found that the ability of a group of judges to agree on their impression of a target depends on the trait dimension considered, on the information available, and on differences among the judges in the frequency with which various trait dimensions are routinely used in describing others. In particular, judging how extroverted or sociable someone is turns out to be much easier than a judgment of intelligence, responsibleness, or honesty. This research will investigate whether this difference remains when more narrow definitions of the traits are provided (e.g., intelligence in a given context), when the acquaintance takes place over a longer period of time, when the outcome judgment has some important consequences for both judge and target (e.g., admission to graduate school), and if the task is to disconfirm an existing impression rather than to form a new one. In addition, differences in the ease of judging these traits are related to theories of how we make attributions for the causes of others' behavior. Finally, a series of studies will explore the representation of impressions in memory. Specifically, these studies look at how closely tied are memories for the actual behaviors performed by someone to inferences based on these acts about the person's underlying personality. To the extent that inferences are not "bound" to the evidence on which they are based, errors in perception are difficult to correct, and change in impressions is unlikely to occur.//
