Blackwell Reference Online

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Considered by many scholars to be a historically significant conceptual development in the study of →  social cognition , implicit personality theories are cognitive structures utilized during →  social perception and in social interaction. The knowledge contained in these structures specifies sets of personality traits perceived to be interrelated. Applied during social perception, implicit personality theories are key to impression formation, allowing a perceiver to make trait inferences, or, infer from a few, initially observed traits that a person will probably have a number of additional, implicated traits. Applied in social interaction, implicit personality theories are a source of person knowledge, a type of knowledge seen as essential to communication skills and achieving communication goals (→  Goals, Social Aspects of ; Interpersonal Communication ), as is knowledge of the self, roles, contexts, emotions, and how to put together one's messages (→  Schemas, Knowledge Structures, and Social Interaction ). Gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch introduced the precedent to implicit personality theories in 1946, the year he published experiments testing his configurational model of impression formation . Asch proposed that given the observation of several initial or stimulus traits, a perceiver would configure the traits to form a gestalt impression of another's personality. ... log in or subscribe to read full text