The Assimilation And Contrast Effect Of Interpersonal Perception

With the priming paradigm, this research studies the interpersonal perception, including personal perception and situational construal. There are three core research objects, which are the prime effect on the personal perception and situational construal, the mediating effect of the situational construal on the personal perception, and the moderating effect of the gender and familiarity on the mediating effect. The tasks were separated into two stages, the priming and perceptual stages. Perception tasks in the priming stages are the lexical decision tasks and those in the perceptual stages are the judgments of the objects and the situations. The description of the situations is a prisoner's dilemma game and the descriptions of the objects include the descriptions of both the virtual and the real persons.The independent variable is the prime stimulus; the dependent variable is interpersonal perception, including the personal perception and situational construal, while the situational construal is also the mediating variable. And the moderating variables are the gender, the familiarity and the gender similarities between the participants and the real objects.The results of this study are as follows. Regarding to the virtual object, the contrast effect is yielded to the personal perception, but not to the situational construal. And there is no mediating effect between the situational construal and the personal perception. For the real objects, the assimilation effect was obtained for both the personal perception and the situational construal. There are significant interaction effect between the gender and the prime stimulus as well as that between the familiarities and the gender similarities between the participants and the real objects. Also the mediating effect of the situational construal to the personal perception is significant, which is influenced by the interaction between the gender and the prime stimulus.