Distinctive Accuracy Paper

When meeting someone new, first impressions are important and can help lead to the formation of relationships (Human, Sandstrom, Biesanz, & Dunn, 2013). There is evidence that social perceptions are driven by biases and occur outside of conscious awareness (Bargh & Williams, 2006). For example, stereotypes provide a means for judging the personality of new acquaintances through the use of cognitive shortcuts. Despite the negative connotations of stereotypes, they are common in personality perception and do not necessarily decrease accuracy of impressions across situations (Borkenau, Mauer, Riemann, Spinath, & Angleitner, 2004).
However, it is quite common for new acquaintances to be viewed positively. One of the mechanisms through which this
This follows the framework of the Weighted-Average Model (WAM; Kenny, 1991), and includes the components of normative and distinctive accuracy (Biesanz & Human, 2010). While normative accuracy refers to the impression of an individual personality in comparison to an average personality, distinctive accuracy refers to the way in which a perceiver recognizes the individual nature of a specific target’s personality (McDonald & Letzring, 2016). Distinctive accuracy is obtained by accounting for the differences in self-reports of personality and the perceivers ratings of personality, excluding the normative profile (Biesanz & Human,
Unfortunately, automaticity in person perception can lead to incorrect impressions. Nordstrom, Hall, and Bartels (1998) examined the effects of stereotypes on impression formation using an interview paradigm. The rationale for their study was that the amount of cognitive load a perceiver is under affects their ability to override stereotypical impressions. They found support for this rationale as participants under high cognitive load did not take situational information into consideration to correct their automatic trait perceptions. However, when it came to making a hiring recommendation, this negative effect was minimized. The researchers attributed this to the fact that making a decision about hiring an individual leads to more in-depth cognitive processing, which provided the ability to override the automatic perceptions of trait