People's traits are inferred from their behaviours

What is it about?

People unconsciously and unintentionally make inferences about others’ personality traits based on their behaviors. For example, upon hearing that “Mary practices the piano for six hours each day,” one might infer that Mary is disciplined. Because STIs are automatic and people are unaware they're making these inferences, STIs are hard to detect. We used a classic memory experiment design and found STIs occur when a person's behaviours are first encountered. Our findings are consistent with an extended version of the interactive activation and competition (IAC) model in which behaviors and personality traits play an important role in organizing knowledge about people.

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Why is it important?

The experiments provide new evidence for the old idea that personality traits provide organizing structures when memorizing other people’s behavior. Moreover, they indicate that the process occurs at information encoding, since the classic memory experiment design we used (proactive interference, or PI) is sensitive only to materials categorized at encoding. Our research raises at least three fundamental questions about person perception and impression formation. All are old questions. But our use of a novel design (PI) to detect STIs may provide promising new approaches to these old questions.