Contributions of a typological approach to associationistic and dimensional views of person perception

Anderson, Craig and Sedikides, Constantine (1991) Contributions of a typological approach to associationistic and dimensional views of person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60 (2), 203–217.

Record type: Article

Abstract

The associationistic view of person perception states that people are perceived in terms of trait covariations. The dimension view maintains that others are perceived by means of a limited number of dimensions. In contrast, the typological view is that others are perceived in terms of person types, and traits within a given person type have a unique interactive relation. In Exp 1 (with 197 undergraduates), associationistic, dimensional, and typological representations of implicit personality theories were empirically derived. The derived stimuli were used in Exp 2, in which 22 undergraduates examined the effects of person type membership on impression priming and perceived trait belongingness, controlling for associationistic and dimensional factors. As expected, results validated the unique contribution of a typological approach to person perception. Implications for the implicit personality theory, stereotype, and person memory literatures are discussed.

This record has no associated files available for download.