Abstract

In the studies of implicit personality theory, it was found that people evaluated others in terms of their social and their intellectual qualities. In a later study, Hamilton and Fallot (1974) found that presenting subjects with social attributes tended to affect judgements of a stimulus person's likability, whereas presenting them with intellectual attributes affected respect for the stimulus person. The respect judgement of the Hamilton and Fallot study was achieved through objective evaluation for the stimulus person, whereas the likability judgement was achieved through subjective evaluation for the stimulus person. In this respect, the respect judgement and the likability judgement of their study were identical with the author's (1974, 1976, 1979a, 1979b, 1979c) favorableness and likableness impression of the person respectively. From this inference, this study was designed to that the hypothesis that the intellectual evaluation attributes would affect subject's favorableness impression for the stimulus person, while the social evaluation attributes would affect their likableness impression for him. To test this hypothesis, 12 sets of personality trait adjectives (all sets were consisted of 4 adjectives) were constructed as the stimulus person in the 4 categories: 3 positive-intellectual attributes sets, 3 positive-social attributes sets, 3 negative-intellectual attributes sets, and 3 negative-social attributes sets. Subjects were 40 sophormores of CNU and they were divided into 2 groups consisted of 20 persons each (favorableness impression group and likableness impression group). The subjects of the faborableness impression group were asked to rate each of the stimulus person in terms of objective goodness or badness, and the subjects of the likableness impression group evaluated how much they would like or dislike each of the stimulus person subjectively, In both cases, the 41 point scale with 0 midpoint was used. The results were as follows: 1) In the positive words sets, the stimulus person characterized by intellectual qualities was rated higher than the stimulus person characterized by social qualities in the favorableness impression, but in the likableness impression, the latter was rated higher than the former: 2) In the negative words sets, the stimulus person characterized by intellectual qualities was evaluated lower than the stimulus person characterized by social qualities in the favorableness impression, whereas in the likableness impression, the latter was evaluated lower than the former. These results were discussed as supporting the hypothesis of this study. Therefore, in this study, it was concluded that the intellectual qualities of the stimulus person acted as the cue information of the objective favorableness impression (god-bad dimension) for him, while the soical qualities of the stimulus person acted as the cue information of the subjective likableness impression (like-dislike dimension) for him.