Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of personality and social psychology, 32(5), 880.
Summary
Participants were assigned an arbitrary “score” for a task which they had previously completed. Participant scores were either average, above average, or below average. They were provided with an average score as a reference point. The participants were then “debriefed” during which the experimenter told them that their score was randomly assigned. Participants were then asked to fill out a self-assessment relating to their task ability. Across the board, initial attributions persisted. If the person was part of the above average group, their self-assessment scores were above average. If they were part of the below average group, their self-assessment scores were below average. This experiment was repeated a second time, this time including observers’ ratings of participant ability as well. Additionally, participants were each given a standard “debrief” or a process-debrief. The standard debrief matched the debriefing of the first experiment, while the process-debrief further expounded on how impression perseverance worked in that specific situation. In all conditions, with both observers and participants, the initial impression persevered.
Application
This has direct applicability to experiments that make use of deception. It is not merely enough to explain that deception was used, experimenters need to explain about how impression perseverance works and how it is likely affecting the participant. Future research could look at the phenomenon of impression perseverance and compare it to anchoring and framing (it could be understood as an artifact of either heuristic). It would also be interesting to see if need for closure scores correlated with impression persistence.
Comments powered by Disqus.