Questions: Impression Formation and Cognitive Integration

Question 1

In Asch's warm/cold experiment, two groups received identical trait lists except that one contained 'warm' and the other 'cold.' The dramatic difference in overall impressions is best explained by:

• A. An averaging effect: warm/cold has high emotional valence that raises or lowers the mean trait rating
• B. Configural integration: warm/cold reinterpreted the meaning of every other trait in the list, changing what 'determined' or 'practical' signified in each profile
• C. A recency effect: warm/cold appeared last in the list and therefore dominated memory
• D. Response bias: participants in the warm condition were more cooperative and rated everything more positively

Answer: (B)

Asch's central theoretical claim was that impression formation is not additive (not a weighted average of trait evaluations) but configural — traits interact and redefine each other. 'Determined' in a warm person sounds steadfast and reliable; in a cold person it sounds ruthless and calculating. The same word changes meaning depending on the organizing frame established by the central trait. Option A — the additive/averaging model — is precisely the model Asch was disproving: if impressions were averages, one changed trait would shift the mean slightly, not transform the entire profile.

Question 2

Asch found that presenting traits in the order 'intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious' produced a more positive impression than the reversed order. This primacy effect is best explained as:

• A. The first traits are easier to remember because they enter an uncrowded memory buffer
• B. Early traits establish an interpretive frame that biases how subsequent, potentially inconsistent traits are read
• C. The negative traits (impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious) have higher salience when encountered first
• D. Participants in the positive-first condition paid less attention by the time they reached the negative traits

Answer: (B)

The primacy effect in impression formation is not primarily a memory phenomenon — it reflects schema-driven processing. Early traits activate a person-schema that filters subsequent information. 'Impulsive' read after 'intelligent, industrious' gets interpreted as spontaneous energy; 'impulsive' encountered first frames the subsequent traits as facets of an unstable personality. The initial information anchors interpretation; later inconsistent information is assimilated into the pre-existing frame rather than triggering equal-weight updating.

Question 3

In Asch's research, whether a trait is 'central' or 'peripheral' is determined largely by its position in the list — central traits are simply those that appear first.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Asch found that centrality is a content property, not a positional one. 'Warm' and 'cold' were central traits because of their semantic richness and organizational power — they connected to many other trait dimensions and reinterpreted them. 'Polite' and 'blunt,' by contrast, remained peripheral even when placed first: swapping them had little effect on overall impressions. The primacy effect (temporal) and the central-trait effect (semantic) are distinct phenomena; centrality is about which traits function as organizing lenses, not about order of presentation.

Question 4

Impression formation tends to operate like Bayesian updating: each new piece of information about a person shifts the overall impression proportionally to the reliability of that evidence.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is the misconception Asch's configural model directly refutes. Bayesian updating would treat each trait as independent evidence, revising the impression proportionally toward accuracy. What Asch showed is that earlier information creates an interpretive frame that distorts how later information is processed. Ambiguous or inconsistent traits are assimilated into the established schema rather than updating it. The impression is self-stabilizing: information that contradicts the initial frame is often discounted or explained away, making genuine proportional revision rare.

Question 5

What does it mean to say that impression formation is 'configural rather than additive,' and why does this explain the durability of first impressions?

Model answer: Configural integration means traits do not contribute fixed positive or negative amounts to a running total. Instead, traits interact: the meaning of each trait shifts depending on what other traits are present. A central trait like 'warm' doesn't just add warmth — it reinterprets 'determined' as reliable and 'critical' as engaged. An additive model would predict that substituting one neutral trait leaves the impression mostly unchanged. The configural model predicts (and Asch confirmed) that replacing 'warm' with 'cold' transforms the meaning of all other traits, producing a dramatically different impression. First impressions persist because early traits activate a schema — an interpretive frame — that subsequently assimilates new information in its own terms rather than being revised by it.

The persistence of first impressions is a direct consequence of configurality: once a schema is activated, incoming information is processed through it, making genuine updating rare and making initial frames self-reinforcing.