FILAMER CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY

AUTONOMOUS STATUS - CHED

PAARALANG GRADWADO
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Website: http://www.filamer.edu.ph/

EDUC.403: Advanced Historical, Philosophical and Legal Foundations of

Education

Prepared by:
CHARLES GIL A. VILLANUEVA- (MAT-FILIPINO)

IMPLICIT PERSONALITY THEORY

What is Implicit Personality Theory?

• An Implicit Theory is a theory that people form about the traits,

characteristics, behaviors, and personalities of other people. (Solomon
Asch)
• He argued that people forming impressions of someone else make use of an
implicit theory, based on the assumption that a person who has a particular
personality trait will tend to have various other related traits.

• Because these ideas about other people are implicit, they occur
automatically and without conscious awareness. When people observe
another person’s behavior, they make implicit inferences about those
behaviors and what they indicate about a person’s personality and
character. This generally happens without direct awareness that these
associations have been made.

• There are two primary approaches to the understanding of implicit

theory.
 Consistency Theory
 Attribution Theory

Consistency Theory
• This approach suggests that the implicit personality theories we form about
other people are primarily informed by what we already know about other
people. It is based on the premise that people will exhibit consistency in
their personality characteristics.
Attribution Theory
• This approach suggests that people believe traits remain stable over time.
So, once you have formed an overall impression of a person, attribution
 theory suggests that you will assume that they will remain the same across
different times and situations.

Factors that influence Implicit Personality Theory

 Central vs Peripheral Traits
 Mood
 Primacy Effect
 Self-Based Heuristic

Central vs Peripheral Traits

• Some traits tend to affect how people perceive a person’s personality more
than other traits do. Central traits are those that play a strong role in
shaping our perceptions of others. Peripheral traits can still have an impact,
but it tends to be weaker than the effect exerted by those central
characteristics.
Mood
• Mood can play a powerful role in affecting the judgments people make and
the impression that they form. Research has found that when people are in
a good mood, they tend to base their assessments more on their first
overall impression.
Primacy Effect
• The Primacy Effect is when people give greater weight to information they
learn first. As the saying goes, you only have one chance to make a first
impression, and the primacy effect means that people’s first impressions
matter more than what they may learn later.
Self-Based Heuristic
• When faced with limited information to use when forming an impression,
people will often fill in the gaps in their knowledge by using information
about themselves.
Effects of Implicit Personality Theory
• The Implicit Theories we form about other people can have various effects.
In some ways, forming these impressions of others can often be a way to
quickly make sense of others in our environment. It allows us to make
judgments quickly without expending much energy. However, it can also
lead to inaccurate impressions and poor judgments.
Sources Consulted
 https://www.explorepsychology.com
 https://journals.sagepub.com
 https://psychology.iresearchnet.com
 https://communicationdiscipline.weebly.com
 https://explorepsychology.com
 https://allabout-psychology.com