Abstract
It was hypothesized that, when subjects form impressions of a person whom they have just met for the first time, the mean proportion of perceived differences between self and other will be approximately 0.368. Undergraduates, 15 women and 15 men, were asked to categorize a new acquaintance, following a brief conversation with him, on 22 bipolar dimensions elicited from themselves. They also categorized themselves on the same dimensions. The mean proportion of judgments of unlike-self. of the new acquaintance was 0.364, which is quite close to the predicted value and consistent with the results of related experiments. Perhaps differences between self and others define the contours of the self as “figure” against a diffuse background of similarities.
Keywords
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
THE GOLDEN SECTION HYPOTHESIS
The golden section is a proportion the aesthetic properties of which have been extolled since antiquity. The data from five experiments in which subjects made dichotomous judgem...
Consensus in personality judgments at zero acquaintance.
This research focused on the target effect on a perceiver's judgments of personality when the perceiver and the target are unacquainted. The perceiver was given no opportunity t...
Linguistic Bases of Social Perception
Target persons were videotaped while engaged in an interview. A text analysis program was used to ascertain the frequency with which they employed negative emotion words, positi...
Positive affect, negative affect, and social interaction.
Two studies explored the relations of positive and negative affect (PA and NA) to social interaction.In Study 1, unacquainted dyads were surreptitiously videotaped as they parti...
The benefits of positive illusions: Idealization and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships.
It is proposed that satisfaction is associated with idealistic, rather than realistic, perceptions of one's partner. To provide baselines for assessing relationship illusions, b...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1977
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 45
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 703-706
- Citations
- 14
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
Cite This
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.2466/pms.1977.45.3.703