Attention and weight in person perception: The impact of negative and extreme behavior.

TLDR

Social perceivers selectively process aspects of others, with attributes that are extreme or negative being more informative, thereby attracting attention and carrying greater weight in impressions, a pattern that informs debates on the rationality of social information processing. The study argues that selective perception is driven by the informativeness of person attributes. The authors manipulated negativity and extremity of sociability and civic activism across 16 stimulus persons, measured attention via looking time while participants switched between two prescaled photographs, and derived attribute weights from Anderson’s information integration model based on likability ratings. Participants preferentially weighted extreme or negative behaviors, and their looking time mirrored this pattern.

Abstract

Social perceivers process selected aspects of the stimulus array presented by another person. This article argues that such selectivity is based on the informativeness of person attributes. Properties of the attribute itself—its evaluative extremity (distance from the scale midpoint) and its evaluative valence (positive or negative)—can make it informative. Informative attributes attract selective attention at input and also carry extra weight in the final impression. In the present research, negativity and extremity were manipulated across two separate behavioral dimensions, sociability and civic activism, and over 16 stimulus persons. Perceivers saw two prescaled behavior photographs for each stimulus person and controlled a slide changer switch—this provided a measure of attention as looking time. Perceivers also rated each stimulus person's likability, providing a measure of relative weight for each slide. Weights were derived from Anderson's information integration model. Perceivers preferentially weighted behaviors that were extreme or negative, and the behavioral measure of attention (looking time) replicated the predicted pattern. The results are discussed in light of controversies over the rationality of social information processing.