Fiske, S. T. (1980). Attention and weight in person perception: The impact of negative and extreme behavior. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 38(6), 889.
Summary
We group people into categories to preserve cognitive resources (we are “cognitive misers”). Doing so allows us to apply past knowledge and experiences to new stimuli. Some attributes are near universal, therefore their informational content is low (they do not serve to differentiate). In evaluating a person, extra weight will be given to attributes that are rare and useful. Fiske proposes a model which allows for context-specific weights which are applied to “scale values.” Statistically strong findings support the hypothesis that behaviors or attributes viewed as more divergent (or extreme) from the norm were weighted heavier in evaluation. Consistent with Baumeister (2001) and Rozin (2001), Fiske finds that negative information is weighted more heavily than positive information. Cues that are weighted more heavily elicit longer looking times.
Application
The design of the stimuli (using 16 different stimuli to avoid stimulus sampling effects) and the experiment (controlling for order) are both good. The quantitative modeling of perception and impression allows for behavioral prediction. This could be useful for scenarios where candidates are evaluated, such as predicting hiring decisions.
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