ABSTRACT

People devote much of their lives to forming and revising impressions of others’ stable characteristics. A manager will watch a new employee for signs of how reliable and cooperative he will be, and that new employee will watch his manager for indications of how authoritative and supportive she is or will be. Coworkers and friends monitor one another’s trustworthiness, and spouses spend a lifetime learning one another’s personality from the broadest tendencies to the narrowest habits. Making judgments about others’ personalities is simply a fundamental component of our cognition as social animals, and these judgments—which tend to be relatively accurate—serve us well to navigate and negotiate how we interact with the world around us (Gibson, 1979; McArthur & Baron, 1983).