The role of category accessibility in the interpretation of information about persons: Some determinants and implications.

TLDR

Personality trait terms act as broad category labels that encode behavior, with the likelihood of using a particular category depending on its relative accessibility and influencing subsequent judgments of the person. The study aimed to test whether activating hostility or kindness concepts influences how ambiguous behaviors are encoded and later judged. Participants first performed a sentence construction task to activate either hostility or kindness concepts, then later read ambiguous behavior descriptions and rated the target on various trait dimensions. Ratings increased with the frequency of prior concept activation and decreased with longer intervals, indicating that category accessibility strongly shapes how social information is encoded and used for judgments.

Abstract

Many personality trait terms can be thought of as summary labels for broad conceptual categories that are used to encode information about an individual's behavior into memory. The likelihood that a behavior is encoded in terms of a particular trait category is postulated to be a function of the relative accessibility of that category in memory. In addition, the trait category used to encode a particular behavior is thought to affect subsequent judgments of the person along dimensions to which it is directly or indirectly related. To test these hypotheses, subjects first performed a sentence construction task that activated concepts associated with either hostility (Experiment 1) or kindness (Experiment 2). As part of an ostensibly unrelated impression formation experiment, subjects later read a description of behaviors that were ambiguous with respect to hostility (kindness) and then rated the target person along a variety of trait dimensions. Ratings of the target along these dimensions increased with the number of times that the test concept had previously been activated in the sentence construction task and decreased with the time interval between these prior activations and presentation of the stimulus information to be encoded. Results suggest that category accessibility is a major determinant of the way in which social information is encoded into memory and subsequently used to make judgments. Implications of this for future research and theory development are discussed.