Impression Formation - Cross-cultural Studies

Cross-cultural Studies

Studies of various kinds of impression formation have been conducted in Canada, Japan, and Germany. Core processes are similar cross-culturally. For example, in every culture that has been studied, Evaluation of an actor was determined by-among other things-a stability effect, a suffusion from the behavior Evaluation, and an interaction that rewarded an actor for performing a behavior whose Evaluation was consistent with the Evaluation of the object person.

On the other hand, each culture weighted the core effects distinctively. For example, the impact of behavior-object Evaluation consistency was much smaller in Germany than in the U.S.A., Canada, or Japan, suggesting that moral judgments of actors have a somewhat different basis in Germany than in the other cultures. Additionally, impression-formation processes involved some unique interactions in each culture. For example, attribute-identity amalgamations in Germany involved some Potency and Activity interactions that did not appear in other cultures.

A book, Surveying Cultures reviewed cross-cultural research on impression-formation processes, and provided guidelines for conducting impression-formation studies in cultures where the processes are unexplored currently.