Priming Of Impression Formation

Impression formation is an important field in social psychology. Since 1 970s, under the influence of cognitive psychology, this field began to study people's inner mind processes. It was from then on the priming effect study in impression formation rose and developed. The priming effect can be divided into assimilation and contrast effect, according to its influence direction on succedent judgements. Assimilation effect means when people contact with priming information, judgements of a target person they make will shift toward the activated information; contrast effect means when people contact with priming information, their judgements will shift away from the activated information. Studies in this domain in early years simply testified the existence of assimilation effect. With further researches, investigators gradually found out contrast effect in experiments, which made people's understanding deeper and more comprehensive. However, because this field is numerous and jumbled, the materials and procedures that investigators used and the viewpoints they held are different, investigators gave all kinds of explains to assimilation and contrast effect. Since Higgins began to study this issue with experiment, investigators put forward numerous viewpoints, among which the representative models are: schemata theory, spreading activation model, storage bin model, inclusion/exclusion model, expectation and contrast model, set/reset model etc. But these models could not interpret all conclusions from experiments. In addition, it is easy to find that in all correlative research reports, most of them used trait concepts as priming materials, hardly used person exemplars. Person exemplar is the common information in everyday lives, and it is pattern of a group of person who has certain character. It has different psychology token with trait concept, so their primes should also have different results. Based on the knowledge of this field, this paper discussed of sorts factors that influence the priming effect in impression formation, and gave a relatively reasonable and comprehensive explanation. Because experiment procedures in former researches lacked ecological validity, this research adopted a imple contextual cue priming paradigm which was put forward by Stapel recently, and this paradigm does not require much priming information. The research had two experiments: Experiment 1 reviewed what was the effect of the trait concept on succedent judgement. In this experiment, 96 undergraduates were randomly assigned to a condition of a 2 (priming information: correlative, uncorrelative) X 2 (priming valence: positive, negative) between subjects design. The dependent variables were subject's scores on rating scales. Experiment2 reviewed the effect of the person exemplar and another factor that influenced the judgement: exemplar's extremity. In this experiment, 181 undergraduates were randomly assigned to a condition of a 2 (priming information: correlative, uncorrelative) X 2 (priming valence: positive, negative) X 2 (prime extremity: moderate, extreme) between subjects design. The dependent variables were the same as in experimentl. The following conclusions were drawn from the above two experiments and the former results: I .When trait concepts are primed, assimilation judgements of ambiguous stimuli are more likely. 2.Priming moderately extreme person exemplars leads to assimilation in judgements of ambiguous targets, but priming extreme person exemplars leads to...