Implicit Personality Theory and Social Judgment: Effects of Familiarity with a Target Person

The hypothesis tested in this study is that judgments of the personality of unfamiliar target persons correspond better with the subject's Implicit Personality Theory (IPT) than judgments of the personality of familiar persons do. Each subject's IPT was individually assessed and represented using multidimensional scaling. Then judgments were obtained about three familiar and three unfamiliar target persons. The correspondence between a subject's IPT and his/her judgments about each target person was measured by fitting these judgments to the subject's IPT structure. This correspondence measure was significantly better for unfamiliar than for familiar targets. This result confirmed the hypothesis.