Jw. Sherman et Sb. Klein, DEVELOPMENT AND REPRESENTATION OF PERSONALITY IMPRESSIONS, Journal of personality and social psychology, 67(6), 1994, pp. 972-983
A developmental model of impression formation was tested. Results indi
cated that the mental representation of personality impressions depend
s on the perceiver's degree of experience with the impression target.
At low levels of experience, impressions consist primarily of stored b
ehavioral exemplars. However, as experience increases, an abstract imp
ression is formed that is subsequently stored and retrieved independen
tly of the behaviors on which it was based. Experiment 2 demonstrated
that impressions continue to evolve once they have become abstract and
that behavioral exemplars affect judgments even when they are not dir
ectly retrieved for judgment purposes. These findings highlight the im
portance of applying dynamic approaches to impression-formation resear
ch.