Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
11-2002
Abstract
People may believe that personal attributes are fixed entities that cannot be changed (hold an entity theory). Alternatively, they may believe that qualities of a person are malleable (hold an incremental theory). In the present research, the authors used Sternberg's (1966) memory search task to examine entity and incremental theorists' cognitive strategies in memory search. It was hypothesized that entity theorists, who have a greater tendency to make spontaneous evaluation of people, would organize impressions in short-term memory according to whether the stimulus persons are positively or negatively evaluated. Next, they might compare the probe only to the stimulus persons with matched valence or discard the ones that did not match the probe in valence. By comparison, incremental theorists, who tend not to make immediate evaluative trait judgments, should be less likely to use these evaluation-based strategies. These hypotheses were confirmed in two memory search experiments, in which the names of positive or negative persons were used as stimuli.
Discipline
Personality and Social Contexts | Social Psychology
Research Areas
Psychology
Publication
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Volume
28
Issue
11
First Page
1518
Last Page
1527
ISSN
0146-1672
Identifier
10.1177/014616702237579
Publisher
SAGE
Citation
TONG, Yuk-Yue, & CHIU, Chi-Yue.(2002). Lay Theories and Evaluation-Based Organization of Impressions: An Application of the Memory Search Paradigm. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(11), 1518-1527.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/280
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1177/014616702237579