MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS OF TRAIT CATEGORIES AND THEIR INFLUENCES ON PERSON PERCEPTION

Three stud ies explored mental representations of the organization of acts into traits, and how such mental representations influence person perception. Specifically, we investigated whether acts vary in their degree of trait-category membership (prototypicality), what determines an act's prototypicality, and whether acts' prototypicalities influen ce conclusions about observed acts. By drawing on research on prototyp icality-based models of mental representations (Osherson, Smith, Wilki e, Lopez, & Shafir, 1990), five hypotheses were proposed about the nat ure of mental representations of traits and how they influence person perception. In Study 1, subjects rated three aspects of several acts: how prototypical of the trait they are, how similar they are to other acts in the trait, and how extreme they are. Subjects showed substanti al agreement on all three ratings. Additionally, an act's similarity t o other acts in the trait was predictive of how prototypical the act w as, but the act's extremity was a stronger predictor of its prototypic ality. Study 2 investigated how the prototypicality of an actor's obse rved acts influences person perception. Subjects were more willing to describe an actor's acts with a trait when the acts were prototypical or similar to each other than when the acts were not prototypical or n ot similar to each other. Study 3 investigated the prototypicality of predicted acts. Results showed that predictions of acts were not influ enced by the prototypicality of the predicted acts. Together, the thre e studies suggest that mental representations of traits are consensual and that they influence person perception.