Throughout the course of life, the average person will have form thousands, maybe even millions, of impressions in the different contexts they will experience. From birth, babies create impressions about their parents or caregivers. These babies will grow into students who will eventually make impressions about teachers, classmates, and friends. In time, these students will transition into adults; these adults will form impressions about colleagues, spouses, and children. Salient traits and behaviors are the information applied to impression formations; however, this information does not always lead to the most accurate impressions. Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg suggest that attention manipulates various impression formations; specifically, selective …show more content…
Because of the incongruent expectancy, "desirable difficulties"1 arise; basically, the incongruent expectancy is an opportunity for additional cognitive effort to define the target, but this expectancy often is a means to an end. For example, if a saleswoman in an expensive boutique sees a young Black male walk into her store, after she has had several robberies with suspects being young Black males, she might follow this young Black male in the store. Her expectancy congruent behavior of the young black male is that he will steal an item from her store; but she will ignore that the young Black male has been respectful throughout his time in the store. The saleswoman's choice to continue to follow the young Black male is her decision to maintain her stereotype of young Black males as the impression of the young Black male that is currently in her store. The saleswoman lacks flexibility in encoding traits. The encoding flexibility model proposes that perceivers, like the saleswoman, ignore their expectancies when their target does not align with them. Instead, the perceiver should use additional cognition to create impressions for the target based on the behaviors he or she has presented, and use traits that are fitting in the present context, not in the imagination. Flexibility in encoding traits will expand the perceivers' attention and open the possibilities of impression …show more content…
However, the context itself exerts influences on impression formation. Generally speaking, the context is the setting in which the target performs the behaviors the perceiver will judge to create impressions of the target. The person observed, also known as the target, may behave differently across contexts; which accounts for variance in impression formation across perceivers. The dichotomy of context in impression formation is the battle between what is common and what is rare. For example, Billy is a student and his impression of Mrs. Jones, his teacher, is that she is extremely rude. Billy's impression derives from the amount of times Mrs. Jones yells at students each day in class. One day Billy visited a church with his family and the preacher was Mrs. Jones. As Billy listened to her sermon, his impression of her changed from rude to nice. The next day in class, the sermon was still salient to Billy and it was difficult for him to view Mrs. Jones as a rude teacher. This example suggests that a perceiver will maintain an impression of a target based on the rare context and not the common context; particularly, the rare context is a new way to view the target and it distinguishes from the common text, so it remains prominent in the perceivers' mind. Selective attention goes to the rare context because the traits that develop from the rare context is