Impression Formation

Impression Formation, Implicit Personality Theory, the use of constructs, and attribution theories are all related on the process in which you develop perceptions about people and how you then try to interrupt their behaviors. The first step in this Process is described as the Impression Formation which can be defined on page 68 as “The theory that explains how you develop perceptions about people and how you maintain and use those perceptions to interrupt their behaviors.” So this is when you first meet someone and based on how they act you perceiving them in your head as they acted. The Next step in this process is called the Implicit Personality Theory which is defined as “Your unique set of beliefs and hypotheses about what people are like.” So after meeting someone you take that first initial meeting of them and base in how you think they will act the next time you see them. After this step we use of constructs which is defined as “Bipolar Quality used to classify people”. After meeting them we use constructs to classify them. Then after that we use the attribution theory to draw our conclusions about the person. The Attribution Theory is defined as “The theory that explains how you generate explanations for a person’s behaviors.” So in this process all of these terms described above are how you judge and classify a person after that first initial meeting. Now hopefully I have described how all of these terms are related in how we go about developing perceptions based on seen behavior.