The informational basis of social judgments: Using past impression rather than the trait description in forming a new impression

In making a new judgment, a person can access relevant past judgments and/or process the stimulus information underlying these judgments. The present study is concerned with (i) the conditions under which past judgments are used instead of stimulus information and (ii) the effects that repeated past judgments have on the representation of the stimulus information in memory. Three experiments were conducted using an impression formation task. Subjects were presented with trait descriptions of hypothetical individuals and were asked to make one, three, or five impression judgments on the basis of each description. It was hypothesized that a new impression will tend to be based on an old one, rather than on trait information, as a function of the ease with which the new impression can be inferred from the old. Ease of inference, in turn, will depend on the similarity of the two impressions and the availability of the past impression. The results of the three studies are consistent with this hypothesis: When past judgments were available, (Expermints 1 and 3), the extent to which they, rather than the trait information, determined the present judgment increased with the similarity between them. However, when another activity interpolated between the old and the new judgments (Experiment 2), thus making the past judgment more difficult to access, the tendency to use the latter diminished considerably. After judging, subjects were given a surprise recognition test for the trait information. Recognition accuracy was superior following a series of related judgments than following unrelated judgments, suggesting that the elaborations and inferences activated by the stimulus information tend to accumulate more under related judgments than under unrelated ones.