Abstract

Three experiments were performed to test the hypothesis that the intellectual traits and the affective traits would have differential effects in forming impression of other person as a function of the type of dependency on him/her and the impression-dimension. In Experiment I, 103 students evaluated 53 personality-trait-adjectives in terms of their value to be considered as important in forming impression of other person in information-dependent-situation and in effect-dependent-situation respectively. From this experiment, 23 intellectual traits, whose importance values in information-dependent-situation were higher than those in effect-dependent-situation, and 18 affective traits, whose importance values in two situations were vice versa from those of intellectual traits, were identified. In Experiment II, a stimulus person, consisted of 24 traits (12 intellectual traits and 12 affective traits), was presented with the schema to farm impression of him/her in information-dependent-situation or in effect-dependent-situation respectively. The main dependent variables were the amount of free recall, the recognition confidence and the SCR score (Bousfield & Bousfield, 1966) of each trait groups. From this experiment, the followings were found; (1) in forming impression of other with the information-dependent-situation schema, the intellectual traits were recalled more, recognized more confidently and their SCR scores were higher than the affective traits, and (2) in forming impression of him/her with the effect-dependent-situation schema, the affective traits were higher than the intellectual traits in all of the 3 dependent measures. In Experiment III, the same stimulus person of Experiment II was presented with the schema to form impression according to the good-bad dimension and the lake-dislike dimension respectively. As predicted, the intellectual traits were recalled more and their SCR scores were higher than the effective traits in the good-bad impression condition, and the amount of recall of the affective traits and their SCR scores in the like-dislike condition were higher than those of the intellectual traits. These results supported fully the hypothesis of this study. From these results, the following conclusion can be elicited: the author's (Cho, 1982a) dual-aspect model of person evaluation is justified in the study of person memory as well as in the study of impression formation (Cho, 1982a, b, 1983, 1984).