Emergence and maintenance in impression formation

Impression formation has in the past always been viewed as an instantaneous one time event. In this experiment impression formation was viewed as a process occurring over time. Subjects received descriptions of a hypothetical individual and then gave trait judgments indicating how they perceived this person. Subjects continued to receive information and make judgments through ten successive trials. Correlations were performed between seven major variables evaluated over the course of the trials. Results showed that the major work of impression formation occurs early in the process and that less is accomplished as time goes on. It was also found that an information processing point of view accommodated much of the results quite nicely.