Affordances in social judgment: Experimental proof of why it is a mistake to ignore how others behave towards a target and look solely at how the target behaves

In this article, we propose a comprehensive conception of what personality traits are and what they mean in lay personology. Our conception is a pragm atic one that relies on the ecological concept of affordance and the theory of dual knowledge. It is not based on the same knowledge-building process as other pragmatic conceptions in that it distinguishes evaluative knowledg e, produced by the generalization of affordances, from descriptive knowledg e, deemed to be of limited importance in trait usage. It posits that an ess ential component of the meaning of traits is how others act: towards the pe rsons who possess these traits. We present a compilation of ten experimenta l studies in various areas of interest (statistical studies of trait/behavi or associations, semantic decision-making, person memory, judgments at zero acquaintance) to prove the importance of the evaluative component composed of others' behaviors (OBs). These experiments show that the evaluative com ponent 1. includes a repertoire of behaviors that is just as reliable for e ncoding traits as the repertoire of behaviors ascribed to the target; 2. ca n be just as accessible as the descriptive component for highly evaluative traits; 3. is very powerful in structuring mental representations of person s; 4. is mon highly activated in social contexts, especially in work-evalua tion situations, and 5. is more discriminative than the descriptive compone nt in immediate appraisals of persons.