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Published on: September 28, 2018
Impression formation stimuli: A corpus of behavior statements rated on morality, competence, informativeness, and
Amy Mickelberg1, Bradley Walker1, Ullrich K H Ecker1
1School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
Abstract:
To investigate impression formation, researchers tend to rely on statements that describe a person's behavior (e.g., "Alex ridicules people behind their backs"). These statements are presented to participants who then rate their impressions of the person. However, a corpus of behavior statements is costly to generate, and pre-existing corpora may be outdated and might not measure the dimension(s) of interest. The present study makes available a normed corpus of 160 contemporary behavior statements that were rated on 4 dimensions relevant to impression formation: morality, competence, informativeness, and believability. In addition, we show that the different dimensions are non-independent, exhibiting a range of linear and non-linear relationships, which may present a problem for past research. However, researchers interested in impression formation can control for these relationships (e.g., statistically) using the present corpus of behavior statements.
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