Who makes a more consistent first impression? Examining the structure and correlates of dissensus.

OBJECTIVE AND BACKGROUND: How do targets shape consensus in impression formation? Targets are known to play an outsized role in the accuracy of first impressions, but their influence on consensus has been difficult to study. With the help of the recently developed extended Social Relations Model, we explore the structure and correlates of individual differences in consensus (i.e., dissensus). METHOD: Across 3 studies, 187 photographs of targets were rated by 960 perceivers on personality and evaluative traits, as well as being coded for physical cues by trained coders. We explored the within-target consistency of consensus across traits, as well as its relationship to four categories of theoretically relevant correlates: expressiveness, normativity, positivity, and social categories. RESULTS: The tendency to make a consistent impression on others was broadly consistent across traits. High-consensus targets tended to be more expressive, had more normative physical cues, and were viewed more positively. CONCLUSIONS: At least in a first impression context, targets may play a unique role in predicting the consensus of personality judgments by providing perceivers with more information to work with, and making a negative impression on others may carry social costs.

Decoupling the Conflicting Evaluative Meanings in Automatically Activated Race-Based Associations.

Implicit measures of attitudes have classically focused on the association between a social group and generalized valence, but debate exists surrounding how these associations arise and what they can tell us about beliefs and attitudes. Here, we suggest that representations of oppression, which relate positively to implicitly measured prejudice but negatively to explicitly measured prejudice, can serve to decrease the predictive validity of implicit measures through statistical suppression. We had participants complete a Black-White implicit association test (IAT) and an IAT measuring representations of oppression, and find that oppression-related representations statistically suppress the relation between IAT scores and explicit attitudes, such that accounting for these representations increases the total amount of variance explained by implicit measures. We discuss the implications of this work both for practical matters around use of the IAT and for theoretical debates on the conceptualization of valence in implicit attitudes.

Self as both target and judge: Who has an easier time knowing their own personality?

OBJECTIVE: The past two decades have established that people generally have insight into their personalities, but less is known about how and why self-knowledge might vary between individuals. Using the Realistic Accuracy Model as a framework, we investigate whether some people make better "targets" of self-perception by behaving more consistently in everyday life, and whether these differences have benefits for psychological adjustment. METHOD: Using data from the Electronically Activated Recorder (n = 286), we indexed self-knowledge as the link between self-reports of personality and actual daily behavior measured over 1 week. We then tested if consistency in daily behavior as well as psychological adjustment predicted stronger self-knowledge. RESULTS: We found that behaving more consistently in everyday life was associated with more accurate self-reports, but that psychological adjustment was not. CONCLUSIONS: Analogous to interpersonal perception, self-knowledge of personality might be affected by "target-side" factors, like the quality of information provided through one's behavior. However, unlike being a good target of interpersonal perception, self-knowledge does not seem to be related to psychological adjustment.

Through the looking glass: Distinguishing neural correlates of relational and non-relational self-reference and person representation.

BACKGROUND: Neuroimaging studies have found a substantial overlap between self-related and social cognitive processes. This study examines three different ways of conceptualizing a person - one that requires considering how they are embedded in their social environment (roles), one that requires considering their generalized qualities (traits), and one that identifies their relevant group memberships. To the extent that relational aspects of identity require considering how a person is embedded in their social environment we should find greater activation for role judgements in regions associated with social cognitive processes. METHODS: During fMRI scanning, 38 participants made stimulus judgments about themselves and a close other regarding the target's traits, social roles, and group memberships in a 2 (target of judgment) x 3 (stimulus category) within-participant design. RESULTS: Relatively greater activation in areas broadly associated with theory of mind and mentalizing (e.g., PCC, TPJ) was found for social role, compared to trait judgments. By contrast, trait judgments, compared to role judgments, activated regions associated with semantic memory (e.g., IFG). Conjunction analyses showed that activations associated with roles overlapped with regions associated with a meta-analytic map of mentalization, judgments made about others, and stimuli reflecting higher social specialization, indicating that roles may require considering how a person is socially embedded. Judgments about group memberships were associated with brain regions found for both trait and role judgments. CONCLUSION: Our findings provide evidence for a distinction between two modes of social reference - one that is relatively more associated with social relational processing (roles) and that is relatively more dependent on semantic memory processes (traits). Given the substantial overlap between the pattern of results for roles (relative to traits) and other (relative to self), it may be the case that at least part of our representation of ourselves and others may fundamentally require representing people as embedded in social networks.