ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the key findings from research conducted within the basic person perception paradigm. The preceding sections of this chapter have traced the development and expansion of the Information Integration Theory approach to impression formation. Traditionally, the study of impression formation has been associated with the person perception task. In this task, individuals are presented with personality trait information about another person and then asked to describe their impression of the stimulus person. In contrast to adding, averaging states that the overall judgment is the mean of the individual components of information. Furthermore, averaging implies that when one already has highly favorable information about another person, the availability of moderately favorable information will decrease the polarity of the final impression. Once the above tests of fit have been met, further tests can be performed to differentiate between adding and averaging.
