The personality of familiar and significant people: The lay perceiver as asocial-cognitive theorist

When are perceivers guided more by implicit social-cognitive theories of pe rsonality and when more by trait theories? As perceivers become more famili ar with a person they infer relatively more psychological mediating variabl es (e.g., construals, goals) that underlie the person's behavior and relati vely fewer broad, uncontextualized traits such as aggressive or friendly (S tudy 1). The effects of familiarity are moderated by the importance of the target to perceivers (Study 2). Specifically, perceivers make relatively mo re inferences using mediating variables and fewer inferences with traits as the target becomes more familiar, if and only if the target plays an impor tant role in their lives. The findings indicate that psychological mediatin g variables play a significant role in lay perception.,; of people and spec ify conditions in which perceiver's function like implicit social-cognitive theorists, namely, when the perceived is familiar and important to the per ceiver.