Affordance Dubois Et Beauvois

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Swiss J Psychol 59 (1), 2000, Verlag Hans Huber, Bern

Swiss Journal of Psychology 59 (1), 2000, 1633

In this article, we present a fairly comprehensive concep-

tion of what personality traits are in lay personology. Our

conception is basically pragmatic, but because it relies on

the ecological concept of affordances and on our own the-

ory of dual knowledge (evaluative knowledge/descriptive

knowledge), it differs fundamentally from most pragmat-

ic conceptions: its underlying assumption regarding the

knowledge-building process is distinct. Briefly, we con-

tend that one of the key components of traits in lay per-

sonology consists of the behaviors others exhibit towards

Affordances in social

judgment: Experimental proofof why it is a mistake to ignore

how others behave towardsa target and look solely at how

the target behavesJean-Lon Beauvois1 and Nicole Dubois2

1 Universit de Nice Sophia-Antipolis2 Universit de Nancy-2

In this article, we propose a comprehensive conception of what personality traits are and what they mean in laypersonology. Our conception is a pragmatic one that relies on the ecological concept of affordance and the the-

ory of dual knowledge. It is not based on the same knowledge-building process as other pragmatic conceptions

in that it distinguishes evaluative knowledge, produced by the generalization of affordances, from descriptive

knowledge, deemed to be of limited importance in trait usage. It posits that an essential component of the mean-

ing of traits is how others act towards the persons who possess these traits. We present a compilation of ten ex-

perimental studies in various areas of interest (statistical studies of trait/behavior associations, semantic deci-

sion-making, person memory, judgments at zero acquaintance) to prove the importance of the evaluative com-

ponent composed of others behaviors (OBs). These experiments show that the evaluative component 1. includes

a repertoire of behaviors that is just as reliable for encoding traits as the repertoire of behaviors ascribed to the

target; 2. can be just as accessible as the descriptive component for highly evaluative traits; 3. is very powerful

in structuring mental representations of persons; 4. is more highly activated in social contexts, especially in work-

evaluation situations, and 5. is more discriminative than the descriptive component in immediate appraisals ofpersons.

Key words: Social judgment, trait, affordance, evaluative knowledge, behavior of others towards a target (OB)


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J.-L. Beauvois, N. Dubois: Affordances in social judgment 17


the individuals the traits describe. Below we present a se-

ries of ten experiments that prove this point empirically.

Affordances in evaluativeknowledge

From man as a scientist to man asa motivated tactician

During the fifties and sixties, the proponents of the axiom

Man is a scientist thought that peoples judgments of

targets were valid (or accurate) to the extent that they were

based on important properties of the targets, and as such,

that they were free of idiosyncrasies. In the area of social

judgment (see for example Anderson, 1981; Srull & Wyer,

1989), this view amounts to considering that judgmentsare mainly based on information processing, through

which some of the intrinsic and presumably unchanging

properties of the person or group being judged are inferred,

and that such processing supplies knowledge about the

judged object which, although inferred, is scientific and

descriptive and, by that token, accurate. Viewed from this

angle, evaluations consisting of attributing value or worth

to the object of a judgment do not take place until after

the fact, being based on this newly-acquired descriptive

knowledge of the object. This may happen via the activa-

tion of affects or connotations elicited by the targets in-

ferred properties, or through calculations about the rami-fications those properties might have with respect to one

or more of the perceivers goals. One implication of this

conception is that if a target receives different evaluations,

it is certainly not because of the knowledge the perceivers

have of that target. It can only be due to individual evalu-

ation differences which we all know exist or to the fact

that the judgments were not made in the same context and

therefore had different evaluative implications. This con-

ception implies the following steps: First, processing the

target information. Then, knowing the targets properties

(unmotivated). Last, determining the targets value.

During the seventies and eighties, this conception of

social judgment was invalidated many times, because thebiases, errors, illusions, and distortions brought to the the-

oretical forefront were described mainly as related to the

processing of descriptive (hence accurate) information

about the targets. They were assumed to be due to the prob-

lems people have grasping the intrinsic properties of ob-

jects, and as such, were regarded as the outcome of knowl-

edge acquired prior to any kind of evaluation process. It

is probably because the errors or distortions were thought

to be rooted in the knowledge-building process itself that

the bias era led to a kind of sullenness in social psychol-

ogists, so apparent in metaphors such as cognitive miser

andfaulty computer(Beauvois & Deschamps, 1990).

In the early eighties, however, some researchers want-

ed to combat this grim trend, not by trying to prove that

there were no grounds for saying that these errors were

really errors, as Funder (1987) did, but by proposing a dif-

ferent understanding of accuracy and of the judgment

process. Many of these authors took what might be called

a pragmatic point of view. They insisted on the need to

reintroduce both the social context and the perceivers

goals into the study of judgment. Swann (1984), for ex-

ample, was opposed to social psychologists quest for

global accuracy resulting in generalizable judgments

which resemble scientific statements (this person is usu-

ally reliable), instead of a more circumscribed accuracy

(P. 461) which is context-dependent (in this context and

given my expectations, I can state that this person is reli-

able). For Swann, people are more accurate with the lat-ter criterion than with the former. While these authors (and

their current followers; see Dardenne, 1997) proposed a

new understanding of what an accurate judgment is be-

cause for them, accuracy is not based on some permanent

knowledge of the object they did not deny that prior

knowledge of some of the targets real properties is need-

ed for an evaluation to take place. In other words, they still

believe that information processing leading to descriptive

knowledge via inferences is a prerequisite of evaluation.

Simply, they assume that this processing step is guided by

the perceivers goals in the context in which he/she is in-

teracting with the target. In sum, they see the perceiversgoals as entering into play upstream, where their impact

would be to guide the knowledge-building process. This

gives us the following steps: First, setting the goals. Next,

processing the target information (goal-oriented). Then,

knowing some of the targets properties (motivated). Last,

determining the targets circumscribed value.

These steps describe the knowing-others process im-

plemented by motivated tacticians (Fiske & Taylor,

1991). It is clear here that while the knowledge is indeed

feeding the action, as assumed in any pragmatic view, it

is still specific to the Knowing Subject.1

Knowledge built by the Acting Subject:affordances

A year before Swann proposed the idea of pragmatic ac-

curacy, McArthur & Baron (1983) attempted to introduce

Gibsons (1979) ecological theory of perception into so-

cial judgment research. This led social judgment special-

ists not only to modify their accuracy criteria, but also to

1 Knowing vs. Acting.


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18 J.-L. Beauvois, N. Dubois: Affordances in social judgment


reexamine the idea of motivated-vs-unmotivated control

of information intake. It led them to reassess the judgment

activity and the role of knowledge. Gibson posited 1. that

under ordinary (ecological) judgment conditions, know-

ing and evaluating are indissociable, and 2. that direct in-

formation intake can override the inference process (in-

formation is acquired rather than being processed).

The concept of affordance covers the essential aspects

of this theory. It first emerged in the work of gestalt the-

orists, who spoke, following Lewin (1926), of the de-

mand character of objects: To primitive man each thing

says what it is and what he ought to do with it: a fruit says

Eat me; water says, Drink me; thunder says Fear me,

and woman says, Love me (Koffka, 1935, p. 7, partial-

ly quoted by Gibson, 1979, p. 137). The term affordance

thus denotes the direct perception of the utility of an ob-

ject, via the perception of its features as they are seen by

a given person acting in a given environment. For exam-ple, such and such a person who wants to go up to a high-

er floor will see the useful property climb-up-ability of

a certain staircase, or such and such a person who has to

get to the other side of a given road will see the cross-

ability of a given piece of pavement. These examples

bring out two essential aspects of the concept of affor-

dance, namely, attunement, which is specific to the indi-

vidual who is perceiving (see McArthur & Baron, 1983),

and organization, just as specific to the properties of the

object. These properties are what make the object useful

to that person, and they are grasped directly. This con-

ception is based on a radical hypothesis since it impliesthat the values and meanings of things in the environ-

ment can be directly perceived (Gibson, 1979, p. 127).

In a single act of perception, information intake affords

both the knowledge and the value (or utility) of the object

for a specific future action. The concept of affordance thus

leads us to revise the steps in the knowledge-building

process: First, orienting ones action. Next, apprehending

the targets useful properties. Then, knowing the target

THROUGH evaluation.

In matters of social judgment and social judgment ac-

curacy, Gibsons ecological approach along with that

based on the work of another instigator of ecological psy-

chology, Egon Brunswik has been the main driving forcein research on knowledge of others at zero acquaintance,

those involved in such research apparently attempting to

stay closer to the Gibsonian prototypes (for a review, see

Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997).

The conception of person knowledge we propose here

is largely based on the concept of affordance, which it

generalizes and incorporates into a more comprehensive

understanding of knowledge which we call the dual-

knowledge theory (evaluative/descriptive). Although we

can ignore the purely metatheoretical and even ideologi-

cal criticisms directed at Gibsons concepts, it is worth-

while here, before we present our conception, to remind

the reader of the most important criticism ever aimed at

pragmatism in general, and at the concept of affordance

in particular, especially since as we shall see the replies

to this criticism will help us grasp the implications of our

conception.

A criticism by a proponent ofthe conception of man as a scientist

Funder (1995) criticizes the pragmatic views. Briefly, his

primary objection is that they lack concern for the person

being judged, concentrating solely on the judges: Accu-

racy is not viewed as dependent on any properties that the

target of judgment actually has. Nearly all the focus is on

the judge, not the judged (p. 656). This criticism seems

all the more legitimate to the extent that in the Gibsonianapproach, all affordances are based on a kind of perceiv-

er-specific attunement to their reception, which is depen-

dent upon the perceivers current objectives.

There are two possible assertions in Funders criticism:

1. a pragmatic criterion does not capture the properties of

the target; 2. what the pragmatic criterion captures about

the target is not general enough, in that it adds no infor-

mation about the judged person outside of the specific con-

text in which the judgment is taking place. Gibsonians can

come up with a better answer to the first assertion than to

the second.

The first assertion is obviously false. As Zebrowitz &Collins (1997) stressed, an affordance is not in the eyes of

the beholder: it truly captures the properties of the object.

But these properties are perceived in terms of the utility

they have for the judge. The climb-up-ability of a given

staircase is not the same for an 8-year-old child as it is for

an adult. But in both cases, climb-up-ability is one of the

real properties of the staircase, even if those properties are

an integral part of a straightforward evaluative or utilitar-

ian judgment. In the same way, it is indeed in a persons

attitudes and behaviors, or even in his/her appearance, that

we can see whether we are dealing with someone who can

be trusted in the matter at hand.

Gibsonians will have more trouble with the second as-sertion. The climb-up-ability of a staircase is only mean-

ingful and real for a person preparing for this particular

action in this particular context, i.e., the person really

needs to go up the stairs. In this respect, Funder is right:

an affordance (climb-up-ability, cross-ability, sexual

availability, dominance, etc.) is always a set of properties

related to the utility the object has for one or more judges

in a given situation. Utility here is not a general and real-

istic property of the object (Beauvois, 1976, 1984). As

such, an affordance cannot be seen as a property of the ob-


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ject in the way that scientists define the general, realistic,

descriptive attributes of objects (e.g., volume, weight, ori-

entation). From this angle, even when an affordance gives

rise to a valid statement, capable of being observed by in-

dividuals in the social environment (i.e., of obtaining a

judgment consensus) we are still not speaking of the same

kind of accuracy as we are in saying, for example, that a

stick is 75 cm long. This is because an affordance is of a

different nature than a descriptive statement about an ob-

ject. It is a property of the perceiver/object pair. By this

token, it is not a piece of general, realistic information

about an object, the perceiver/object pair being purely ar-

bitrary relative to the object. We shall return to this point

in the discussion. Whatever the case may be, we can eas-

ily see why the Gibsonian approach cannot satisfy the pro-

ponents of the idea that social judgments are based on de-

scriptive knowledge (general and realistic) of social ob-

jects. We are not questioning the potential existence ofsuch knowledge. We simply want to highlight the fact that

this is not the kind of knowledge that takes effect in so-

cial judgments.

Descriptive person knowledge is possible:the targets behaviors (TB)

Personality traits (extroverted, condescending, aggres-

sive, etc.) are often assumed to be intrinsic properties of

the persons the Knowing Subject is judging, even if trait

words can have other functions, like serving as a basis

for categorizing behaviors (Bassili, 1989). Because traitscannot be seen directly, their apprehension depends on

their visible manifestations. A long-standing tradition in

social cognition research views target behaviors (and tar-

get productions or actions) as visible manifestations of

traits. This implies that traits are defined by what they

mean at the behavioral level, both in real-life situations

and in the mind (Beauvois & Dubois, 1992; Buss & Craik,

1983; Mischel, 1973; Riemann & Angleitner, 1993; Woj-

ciszke & Pienkowski, 1991; Wojciszke, Pienkowski,

Maroszek, Brycz & Ratajczac, 1993; etc). Accordingly,

many models of social cognition (and in particular, of per-

son memory: Srull & Wyer, 1989) stipulate that knowing

about a target means being able to encode his/her behav-iors in terms of traits.

People are barely if at all sensitive to behavioral speci-

ficity (Mischel, 1968) or to the situational determinants of

the way people act. It follows that the encoding of traits

in terms of the targets behaviors (Target Behaviors: TB)

is based on an implicit causality of an internal nature (Mol-

laret, 1998). It also follows that TB-based trait encoding

allows people to devise a general and unchanging concept

of the persons in their environment, and that this concept

encompasses properties assumed to be intrinsic to those

persons. This is what most social cognition theorists be-

lieve. We do not challenge the existence of general de-

scriptive knowledge of objects. We shall see, however, that

it seems to have little impact on social judgments.

General pragmatic knowledge ispossible: the behaviors of others towardsthe target (OB)

The above considerations indeed suggest that social ob-

servers have only two routes for making their social judg-

ments and evaluations, each one giving rise to a different

approach. As Knowing Subjects, social observers will

want to grasp what a target is, irrespective of the goals of

their own actions, so they will strive to decode the targets

behaviors in terms of traits. Then they may or may not

evaluate. As Acting Subjects, social observers have only

pragmatic ambitions, and in this case they will judge a tar-get solely according to what they want to do with that tar-

get, and they will make accurate judgments only in the

context of their relationship with him/her. The former ap-

proach, the traditional one, has always had (and still has)

its supporters, insofar as it seems to be quite difficult for

social psychologists to admit that people can get along

without knowing the general properties of objects. How-

ever, a growing number of researchers are defending the

latter approach, the pragmatic one (Dardenne, 1997), even

if, as stressed above, it is very difficult for them to com-

pletely free themselves from the traditional view despite

their ambivalence about it.The Gibsonian approach should enable us to get be-

yond this state of affairs in at least two ways. Firstly, it al-

leviates the need for the information processing idea and

the inference-making premise. Secondly, it is grounded in

another conception of knowledge, one that intrinsically

implies a utilitarian and thus evaluative focus. But it is no

better than any of the other pragmatic approaches at

achieving an essential goal set by all theorists of social

cognition apart from Gibson namely, to come up with

a credible conception of social-object knowledge in which

that knowledge is not only useful, granted, but also gen-

eral and somewhat realistic. When people talk about oth-

ers, they in fact call upon general knowledge they assumeis realistic. In short, what we can legitimately hope for is

a theory that, while still being pragmatic, does not force

us to throw out the idea of general object knowledge. Gib-

sons approach can help us, but it does not suffice.

In the present article, we are going to combine the Gib-

sonian approach with the dual-knowledge theory (de-

scriptive knowledge/evaluative knowledge: Beauvois,

1990; Beauvois & Dubois, 1992, 1993) and show that this

combination offers us a conception of target object knowl-

edge that is useful, general, and realistic: useful insofar as


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it is rooted in the possible ways of acting upon or with a

target; realistic to the extent that it captures some of the

targets intrinsic properties, even if they are structured by

fundamentally utilitarian considerations; general in that it

is not limited to a specific context of action. In the merged

form of these two theories, traits are equated with gener-

alized affordances and personology is equated with eval-

uative knowledge. Let us look at this idea in greater depth.

An affordance captures certain properties of a target, in

context, to the extent that those properties definepossible

actions on or with the target. For example, some of the ap-

parent properties of a colleague, in a particular context,

will make me see that colleague as a person I can trust, to-

day, in my current course of action. I would say, then, that

this colleague, here and now, looks honest. This affor-

dance, in which a capturing of target characteristics is

stated (labelled) in terms of the targets utility for my

current action and particular state of attunement, may leadme to give him confidential information with a view to

reaching a shared goal or even a goal that is solely my

own. The generalization of this affordance could lead me

to speak later of that target as a generally honest per-

son. What would I mean exactly? Admittedly, it is unlikely

that I would mean that he is a person who would turn in a

wallet he found, or who would notify the bank of an error

in his favor (two target behaviors used repeatedly in so-

cial cognition research to describe the trait honest).

More likely, I mean that one can (that is, in general) ex-

hibit a behavior with this colleague that an earlier affor-

dance led me to exhibit or envisage: you can trust him,you can give him confidential information, you can lend

him the keys to your office. These are all actions that oth-

ers can take towards the target (OB behaviors). And what

about the people listening to me, what will they under-

stand? That the colleague Im talking about turns lost wal-

lets into the police or mentions errors in his favor? Per-

haps if we believe certain researchers in social cogni-

tion. But maybe, even without any cognitive detours, they

will understand outright that one can trust him and con-

fide in him. The use of a trait does indeed supply general

information about a target person, insofar as it conveys the

affordances that may come to be when one comes in con-

tact with that person. Thus, behind any trait there is a reg-ister of reality made up of one or more actual affordances,

accompanied by a personological premise of implicit in-

ternal causality that allows the affordances to be general-

ized by removing them from specific contexts. If a trait,

say the trait honest in our example, is indeed a general-

ized affordance, its use in a person description should

therefore activate the repertoire of actions that others ex-

hibit towards/with that person (OB behaviors), as well as

the well-known repertoire of behaviors exhibited by the

target person him/herself (TB behaviors).

Thus, we define a trait as the result of the generaliza-

tion of one or more affordances, i.e., as referring to a de-

contextualized universe of possible ways of acting upon

or with a person who has that trait. The empirical part of

this article validates this understanding of traits and the

importance of OB behaviors. It will be followed by an

analysis of some theoretical implications of the view de-

fended here.

The importance of the behaviors ofothers in the personological universe:traits as generalized affordances

This section presents a series of experimental studies,

some already published, others currently under review,

and still others awaiting write-up. Although based on a

wide variety of paradigms, these studies show three im-

portant things.1. Others Behaviors (hereafter called OBs) work just as

well in personology as Target Behaviors (hereafter

called TBs). More specifically:

Study 1 (Beauvois & Dubois, 1992, Exp. 1) shows

that OBs provide a system for encoding traits that is

just as efficient as TBs.

Studies 2a (Beauvois & Durand, 1998) and 2b (Beau-

vois & Frattino, 1996) show that OBs drive implicit

personality theories that are very much like the ones

driven by traits.

Study 3 (Dubois & Beauvois, 1999) shows that as

person recall cues, OBs are as good as traits and TBs.2. OBs can be more accessible when one is dealing with

the more evaluative traits in the personological reper-

toire. More specifically:

Study 4 (Beauvois & Dubois, 1992, Exp. 2) shows

using a semantic decision-making task that the time

taken to assign an OB to a highly evaluative trait is

no longer than the time taken to assign a TB to the

same trait. This no longer holds true when the traits

in question are not very evaluative.

Study 5 (Beauvois, Dubois, Mira & Monteil, 1996,

Exp. 3) shows that in person-information recall, OBs

are retrieved better than TBs when they instantiate

very evaluative traits, whereas TBs are retrieved bet-ter when they instantiate traits that are not very eval-

uative.

3. OBs are more accessible when a social context is made

salient. More specifically:

Studies 6a and 6b (Beauvois, Dubois & Tarquinio,

1994) show using a semantic decision-making task

that the time taken to assign OBs to highly evalua-

tive traits decreases when a social representation or

a social context is activated (in other words, the ef-

fect obtained in Study 4 increased).


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Study 7 (Dubois & Tarquinio, 1998, Exp. 2) shows

that OBs are highly accessible when the social judg-

ment is work-related.

4. OBs trigger more discriminating social judgments than

do traits or TBs:

Study 8 (Mignon & Mollaret, 1999) shows this us-

ing judgments at zero acquaintance.

In the studies described below, OBs and TBs were used as

stimuli. By definition, a TB is a behavior that can be ex-

hibited or executed by a person, and is a typical example

of a trait that characterizes that person. Say a man is seen

pointing out to a supermarket cashier that she gave him

back a hundred extra francs. The behavior pointing out

a mistake made in ones favor is a TB that allows one to

attribute the trait honest to that man. An OB, again by

definition, is a behavior that others can exhibit or execute

towards or with a person and is a typical example of a traitthat characterizes that person. For instance, others may or

may not trust a person. Someone you can trust is an OB-

type expression. It too allows one to attribute the trait hon-

est to the person others trust.

TBs and OBs were collected using a standard two-step

procedure: 1. free production by subjects of OB and TB

behaviors for various traits, and 2. statistical study with

new subjects of trait/behavior associations. For step 1, for

example, Beauvois & Dubois (1992, 1993) read a list of

33 traits to students. Half were asked to state a behavior a

person with each trait could be expected to exhibit (TB).

The other half were asked to state a behavior than onecould/should exhibit towards a person with that trait (OB).

Redundancies were then eliminated and the wording was

standardized across the subjects responses, giving two

final lists for each trait: one containing only TBs (mean

number of TBs per trait: 15.1) and one containing only

OBs (mean number of OBs per trait: 10.5). For step 2, dif-

ferent subjects were given one or the other of the two be-

havior lists (TBs or OBs) and were asked to choose the

behaviors they felt best represented what the trait con-

veyed. This was used to determine which TBs and OBs

had equivalent association frequencies.

To avoid parentheses containing statistical data, two types

of effects will be mentioned below: 1. statistically significanteffects (p < .05) and 2. clearly nonsignificant effects (p > .15).

Personological information in OBs is justas important as in TBs

One of the characteristics shared by the studies that fall

under this heading is that they were not designed to demon-

strate differences but similarities. So our presentation of

the hypotheses will be brief. In each case, our goal will be

to show that OBs work just as well as TBs.

Study 1. Trait/behavior associationfrequencies

The view presented above assigns a trait-processing role

to OBs that is at least as important as the one TBs are as-

sumed to play. First we wanted to make sure OBs provideas good a system for encoding personological information

as TBs. To this end, based on an earlier study of 33 traits,

we gave 120 students 33 lists of behaviors each introduced

by one of the 33 traits. Sixty students were given TB lists

and sixty were given OB lists. The instructions were to

check off the behaviors on each list that were the most

characteristic of the information conveyed by the trait.

The number of behaviors to check was stated and varied

with list length (one behavior was to be selected for every

five behaviors proposed). For each behavior checked, the

students also had to rate their confidence in their answer

on a 6-point scale (16). Only those behaviors checked byat least 25% of the students were retained. The main re-

sults are given in Figure 1, where the data for the 18 traits

with a positive connotation (upper part of figure) are sep-

arated from the data for the 15 traits with a negative con-

notation. Column 1 gives the rank in the hierarchy of the

trait/behavior association frequencies. These frequencies,

which are averaged over all the traits examined,2 are shown

in the Frequency column. The Confidence column

gives the mean confidence rating for the trait/behavior as-

sociations. We can see for positive traits, for example, that

the mean trait/behavior association frequency of the most

widely chosen behavior on the TB lists (rank 1) was .70.

The rank 1 associations obviously included all traits (18)

and gave rise to a mean confidence rating of 4.12. The line

immediately below gives the same information for the OB

lists.

The resemblance of the statistical properties of the two

types of lists is striking: the frequency hierarchies are vir-

tually identical, as are the confidence curves, which de-

crease with rank. There was only one small significant dif-

ference on the negative traits between how much confi-

dence the students had in their TB vs. OB judgments. This

difference is easily understood: students were probably

somewhat reluctant to attribute confidence to a decision

that says they might act towards others in a negative orvery negative way.

Basically the same results were found recently by

Mignon & Mollaret (1999) with a different set of 24 traits.

In their study, all lists had the same number of behaviors

(three), judged in advance to be the most representative

ones among larger behavior sets. Students chose only one

2 The number of traits decreases with the rank because not alllists had the same number of selected behaviors (selected byat least 25% of the subjects).


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behavior. Mignon & Mollaret found that the top rank was

earned by 58.62% of the TBs and 63.81% of the OBs.

Rank 2 was obtained by 33.9% and 32.8%, respectively.

These figures show that using a trait in a psychologi-

cal description can activate the OB register, and that this

register is not statistically more ambiguous or less un-

equivocal than the TB register. They thus raise the ques-

tion of why, in spite of Gibson, OBs have been complete-

ly neglected in social cognition research.

Studies 2a and 2b. Implicit personalitytheories

Study 1 showed that OBs are a good system for encoding

personological information. Studies 2a and 2b will show

that the dimensional structure of the OB register is effi-

cient and intelligible (Study 2a) and is a good approxi-

mation of trait-generated implicit personality theories

(Study 2b). Remember that the term implicit personali-

ty theories is commonly used to refer to the dimension-

al structure of a matrix that describes associations between

traits.

Figure 1: (Study 1): Frequencyof trait/behavior associations(TB and OB behaviors).


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In Study 2a, 37 ordinary men and women had to sort

86 OBs representing 86 common traits. They were asked

to put the OBs that went together in the same pile, and told

they could make as many piles as they wanted. OBi and

OBj were considered to co-occur every time they were put

in the same pile. Each ij pair was then assigned a score be-

tween 0 and 37 equal to the number of co-occurrences.

The co-occurrence matrix was converted into a distance

matrix (using the distance index generally used in the study

of implicit personality theories: see Rosenberg & Sedlak,

1972). The scores were processed in a multidimensional

analysis that yielded a good, intelligible solution (alien-

ation: .019; constraint: .017) with three dimensions. The

first dimension was a classical bipolar evaluative dimen-

sion representing approach/avoidance. The behaviors

were well distributed around zero on this dimension,

which opposed OBs like You can undertake things with

this person in full confidence to OBs like This is some-one you should avoid. The other two dimensions were

unipolar. Their interpretation was quite clear due to a few

behaviors that were more highly polarized than the oth-

ers. Note that in both cases, the behaviors on the first di-

mension were fairly neutral and defined a social relation-

ship with the target. On dimension 2, the relationship could

be described as target-helping and constructive goodwill

(e.g., You have to reassure him/her all the time or We

need to help him get ahead) and on dimension 3, it was

subordination with respect to the target (Hes someone

you need as an ally or You have to sell yourself to him).

Study 2a thus defined an OB universe whose first dimen-sion was the evaluative dimension of implicit personality

theories (Beauvois, 1984; Kim & Rosenberg, 1980;

Rosenberg & Sedlack, 1972). Dimensions 2 and 3 re-

flected the anchoring of OBs in a social reality that was

both neutral and asymmetrical. This corresponds quite

well to the idea that the social world is an affect neutral-

izer, and especially, that it has structural asymmetries. But

is this OB universe as good an approximation of implicit

personality theories as the ones that can be established on

the basis of the traits themselves?

This is the question we tried to answer in Study 2b. The

materials were 32 traits (from the list used by Beauvois &

Dubois, 1992), each accompanied by some information.Different pieces of information were selected on the ba-

sis of pre-tests (some of which were run specifically for

this study, others that had served in earlier studies) de-

signed to determine how well they instantiated the trait.

They consisted of TBs, OBs, target states (TS) such as

Someone who is happy with him/herself, and the states

of others relative to the target (OS) such as Someone for

whom you feel no compassion. At this point, the reader

knows what OBs and TBs are. Both are behaviors. Mol-

laret (1998) suggests that the tendency of social psychol-

ogists to focus on the behavioral significance of traits may

be rooted in a cultural bias. His studies showed that peo-

ple can process, and be very sensitive to, another register

of personological meanings, one composed essentially of

states (feeling tense, feeling sympathetic, etc.). These last

two types of information, the targets states and others

states regarding the target, were thus added to Study 2b.

Subjects (32 students) had to do five sorting tasks on this

information. Here again, they could make as many piles

as they wanted, as long as all information in a given pile

went together. Everyone was given the traits first and

asked to sort them into piles, and then, in a different but

controlled order, they received the series of OBs, TBs, TSs,

and OSs, each containing 32 items to sort. Five between-

item distance matrices were then compiled following ex-

actly the same procedure as in Study 2a. Table 1 gives the

correlations between the five matrices.

These correlations point out substantial structural con-sistency between the five types of personological infor-

mation, and in particular, between the four types of trait-

based information, so consistent that one can wonder what

has caused researchers to take an overwhelming interest

in only one of the types (TBs). This question is all the more

troubling since various studies on OBs and the few stud-

ies on TEs (Mollaret, 1998) have shown that, despite this

overall consistency, the values and causalities conveyed

by other kinds of information differ from those of TBs.

To get back to our point here, the fact remains that OBs

supply as good an approximation of implicit personality

theories as do TBs.

Study 3. Cued recall

The above studies grant OBs a personological role at least

as important as that of traditional TBs. A study using the

cued recall paradigm showed that whenever a person is

characterized by a trait, OBs work as well as TBs.

A sample of 354 students brought together in a lecture

hall were given a test booklet containing five short por-

trayals of five persons described by their first name, some

information previously tested and shown to be neutral (ma-

jor in college, year in school, hobbies, demographic in-

formation, place of residence), and a piece of persono-logical information expressed in the form of a trait. Only

Table 1: (Study 2b): Correlations between the distance matricesfor five kinds of person information (Bravais-Pearson r)

TB OB TS OS

Traits .62 .66 .59 .62TB .49 .50 .47OB .57 .66TS .62


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one of the portrayals (Pierres) was used later. The loca-

tion of Pierres portrayal in the series was varied system-

atically. Four traits were used to describe Pierre: two with

a positive connotation (honest and helpful) and two with

a negative connotation (self-centered and liar). One of the

four versions of Pierres portrayal is given below in illus-

tration: Pierre is studying German. He is currently in his

second year of college. People say hes an honest person.

He likes to travel. He is single and lives in the Montbois

dormitory.

The students were instructed to read the five portrayals

carefully and form an impression (they were told they had

to get a feeling for the type of person they were reading

about). Next they did a distractor task. After that, they were

given one piece of information and asked to recall the name

of the person it was about (in fact, the person was always

Pierre). The information was either the trait stated in

Pierres portrayal, a typical TB of that trait, or a typicalOB of that trait. Finally, the students were asked various

questions about how much confidence they had in their

response. Regarding the recall of the name Pierre (01

variable processed in an ANOVA for dichotomous data),

only the connotation effect was significant: students re-

membered Pierre better when he was described using a

negative trait than a positive trait. The three recall cues

used (trait, TB, OB) did not give rise to any significant

variations (see row 1 of Table 2; the advantage of OBs over

TBs was nonsignificant: p < .10). Confidence (rated on a

6-point scale) was greater for negative traits. It varied

little with the type of recall cue, although there was a ten-dency (p < .10) suggesting that it might be greater when

the trait itself was given (row 2) (a fact we are mention-

ing here because it turned out to be significant when

only those students who remembered Pierres name were

considered; see row 3).

A twin experiment was conducted with memoriza-

tion instructions (subjects were told to memorize the in-

formation they were given). The same results as above

were found.

The point worth retaining in these four studies is that

OBs appear to provide personological information that is

just as important as that supplied by TBs, from both the

structural standpoint (implicit personality theories) andthe operational standpoint (information processing and

memorization). We are now going to discover that OBs

have some theoretically interesting qualities.

OBs are more accessible when we

are dealing with highly evaluative traitsTwo questions will be addressed in this section. Can OBs

be regarded as inferences made by people on the basis of a

memory store composed solely of TBs? Do OBs function

equally well for all items in the personological lexicon?

One of the independent variables in the experimental

design calls for a few preliminary remarks. It concerns the

traits used, and opposes so-called evaluative traits to so-

called descriptive traits. The traits are labeled this way

for convenience. We are indeed thoroughly convinced that

traits have several underlying components: a descriptive

component, an evaluative component, an affective com-

ponent, and so on. We shall nevertheless oppose highlyevaluative traits like honest, sincere, and hypocritical

(traits whose evaluative component outweighs the de-

scriptive component) to highly descriptive traits like shy,

sensitive, and talkative (traits whose descriptive compo-

nent outweighs the evaluative component). Although in-

tuitively, this criterion is fairly straightforward, we con-

ducted several pre-tests to validate our intuitions (see

Beauvois & Dubois, 1991). While being based on in dif-

ferent theories, the various pre-tests all gave rise to virtu-

ally the same desirability hierarchy, the classical one (see

Andersons list of 555 traits, 1981). Although in the Eng-

lish-speaking research, the concept of desirability tradi-tionally confounds value and affect, it is clear here that the

traits we call highly evaluative are indeed conveyors of

strong positive or negative connotations, whereas the traits

we call highly descriptive are closer to being neutral.

Study 4. Semantic decision-making

We contend that in many cases, access to the OB register

is as direct as it is to the TB register. This assumption coun-

ters a hypothesis that one might use against us, that OBs

result from inferences made on the basis of TBs, which

therefore come first in the semantic processing of traits.

One could, for example, claim that it is because I havestored in memory the association honest/turns in wal-

lets to police (TB) that I can infer that an honest person

is someone to whom I can lend money (OB). Note al-

ready that Study 1 above showed that such inferences must

be perfectly trivial since the OB selection rate exactly

matched the TB selection rate. To decide which of these

two hypotheses is right, we used a semantic decision-mak-

ing task.

After practicing on five sentences paired with irrele-

vant words, twenty students tested individually read 80

Table 2: (Study 3): Recall of the targets name and correspond-ing confidence ratings, by type of recall cue

Traits OBs TBs

Recall rate .49 .53 .42Confidence in response (05) 3.09 2.55 2.57Confidence in response on correct recall 3.91 2.97 3.17(05)


10/18



test sentences on a computer screen, each paired with a

trait word. A test sentence was displayed followed by a

trait word, and the subjects had to say as quickly as pos-

sible whether the sentence just read went with the infor-

mation conveyed by the trait. Reaction time was record-

ed. The 80 sentences were experimentally associated with

four trait words (20 sentences per word). Among the 20

sentences, 12 were OBs (6) and TBs (6) that instantiated

the trait word and had variable but comparable associa-

tion frequencies, 6 were OBs (3) and TBs (3) that instan-

tiated other traits, and two were an OB and a TB that in-

stantiated a virtual or true antonym of the trait word. Two

of the four trait words (all with a positive connotation)

were highly evaluative (likeable, honest) and two were

highly descriptive (emotional, shy).

Two contrasting hypotheses can be set forth here. The

first is inconsistent with our predictions: if it is true that

OBs are based on inferences made from TBs, then reac-tion time should always be greater for the former than for

the latter. When working with reaction times, it is indeed

customary to consider that cognitive operations take time.

So, if an OB can only be judged after one or more TBs

have been elicited, then reaction time should be longer

than for TBs, which can be judged directly. One can there-

fore expect only a main effect of the type-of-behavior vari-

able. The second hypothesis, which accords with our pre-

dictions, says that reaction time must not differ for OBs

and TBs, at least for what we consider to be highly eval-

uative traits, i.e., ones that carry more utilitarian knowl-

edge anchored in affordances. For these traits, OBs can bejudged directly without the pre-activation of TBs. Now for

highly descriptive traits, we agree that TB activation may

be necessary. We thus expected to obtain and this was

our main hypothesis an interaction between the type of

trait and the type of behavior being judged, without rul-

ing out the possibility of a main type-of-behavior effect

for descriptive traits alone. Let us add that we had no the-

oretical grounds for making different hypotheses regard-

ing positive and negative responses, even if linguistic stud-

ies on the affirmation/negation opposition (Clark, 1969;

Singer, 1981) and research on the falsification of asser-

tions (Gilbert, 1991) suggest that negative responses will

take more time.The expected interaction (see Table 3) was indeed sig-

nificant and supported our hypothesis. This shows that for

positive and negative responses alike, OBs arejudged as

rapidly as TBs on evaluative traits. On the other hand, they

are judged more slowly on descriptive traits.

These results are only consistent with the TB pre-pro-

cessing hypothesis in the case of descriptive traits. Indeed,

in this case, OBs would follow TB processing, thereby ac-

counting for the slowness of OB judgments. But the re-

sults also showed that on highly evaluative traits, OBs were

processed as quickly as TBs, which means that they, too,

can be judged directly. These results allow us to contend

that when highly evaluative traits are at stake, OBs are in-

deed stored and granted a status in long-term memory that

is at least equivalent to that of TBs. Note that several mod-

els can account for this status (schemas or categories, as-

sociative networks, etc.), but that is another issue. So, we

should be able to find proof of this status using the most

typical person knowledge paradigms. The next study,which uses such a paradigm, will supply this proof.

Study 5. Person memory

Three nearly identical person-memory experiments were

conducted. In the person-memory paradigm, subjects are

given information about a target person and have to recall

it later. The three experiments differed only with respect

to the between-subject independent variables; the proce-

dure and within-subject independent variables were iden-

tical. The results of the three experiments were exactly the

same, so only one will be reported here.In the third experiment, 120 students who were enrolled

in an ongoing education program at a local university were

contacted individually. They were given a list of 36 be-

haviors said to be highly characteristic of a person named

Jacques, and asked to get a feeling for what type of per-

son Jacques was. Jacquess social status was not men-

tioned to one group of subjects, he was presented as a peer

(another student in the same program) to a second group,

and said to be a teacher in that program to a third group

(between-subject variable: no information vs. student vs.

teacher). The 36 behaviors describing Jacques instantiat-

ed 6 traits (3 highly evaluative: dynamic, honest, open-

minded; 3 highly descriptive: emotional, shy, enthusias-tic). For each trait, three OB behaviors and three TB be-

haviors taken from past pre-tests were placed on a list. The

OBs and TBs were matched on trait/behavior association

frequency, but the traits themselves were never mentioned.

After reading the behavior list, the subjects did a short dis-

tractor task involving operations on numbers, and then had

to recall whatever they could remember about Jacques. We

expected evaluative trait/OB associations and descriptive

trait/TB associations to show up in the recall as an inter-

action between the type of trait and the type of behavior.

Table 3: (Study 4): Time taken (in ms) to judge relevant OBs andTBs in a semantic decision-making task (from Beauvois &Dubois, 1992)

Evaluative traits Descriptive traitsOB TB OB TB

Yes answer 1103 1098 1462 1197No answer 1554 1516 1832 1420


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More precisely, we predicted that OBs would give rise to

better recall on evaluative traits and that TBs would give

rise to better recall on descriptive traits.

The results are presented below. The findings were the

same with pure memorization instructions (Beauvois et

al., 1996, Exp. 2; see also Milhabet, 1999). In all five stud-

ies, the behavior (OB/TB) by trait (evaluative/descriptive)

interaction was highly significant (p < .0001). In the pre-

sent study, the mean number of behaviors subjects re-trieved in each case is given in Table 4. For highly evalu-

ative traits, subjects remembered more OBs than TBs, and

vice versa for highly descriptive traits (they remembered

more TBs than OBs).

Additional analyses showed that the behavior recalled

first was usually an OB whereas the behavior recalled last

was usually a TB. They also showed that in the most fre-

quently recalled pairs (two behaviors recalled one after the

other), far more OBs than TBs were mentioned first.

Study 5 thus confirmed the links observed in Study 4

between OBs and evaluative traits and between TBs and

descriptive traits. It also suggested that OBs may be en-dowed with a memory structuring power that exceeds that

of TBs.

OBs are more accessible when a socialcontext is made salient

More than the type of behavior (OB vs. TB) and more than

the type of trait considered (evaluative vs. descriptive),

what proves to be important in person memory is the fit

between the type of behavior and the type of trait. A re-

cent study (Milhabet, 1999) showed that it is easier to un-

derstand the links between person memory and person

judgments when we take this fit into account. OBs seemto be very accessible when highly evaluative traits are at

stake, and TBs seem to be so when the traits are more de-

scriptive. This behavior-by-trait interaction has shown up

time and time again in our experiments. We have some-

times found that it accounts for even more of the variance

when the situation induces a mental representation of a

social relationship with the target. This comes through as

a second-order interaction that does not change the first-

order trait/behavior interaction but reduces or enhances it.

Accordingly, in Beauvois et al.s (1996) Experiment 1 (not

presented here), the trait/behavior interaction was stronger

when the target was said to be a student than when he was

merely said to be a person. In Study 5 above, the sec-

ond-order interaction revealed that it was when the tar-

gets social status was given, especially when he was pre-

sented as a teacher, that the trait/behavior interaction ac-

counted for the greatest amount of variance. Again, when

the target was just a person it accounted for the small-

est amount.

These observations suggest that in the more metalin-

guistic situations (see the semantic decision-making task

in Study 2), subjects do as they are implicitly asked to do:

they base their response on the meanings of the words,

thereby minimizing the impact of evaluative knowledge

to the greatest semantically-acceptable extent. But when

the experimental situation brings into play a fictitious or

real relational context, and thus has a social weight that

takes the subject out of the purely metalinguistic register(see Study 5 where the target had a social status), evalua-

tive knowledge represented by OBs is activated and pro-

duces maximal effects. This idea led us to conduct the

studies reported below.

Studies 6a and 6b. Back to semanticdecision-making

If the above considerations are valid, then the trait/behav-

ior interaction observed in the semantic decision-making

paradigm, which was purely metalinguistic in Study 4,

should be stronger if the situation has some social signif-icance. We conducted Studies 6a and 6b to test this hy-

pothesis.

In Study 6a, although the task itself was identical to the

one used in Study 4 (subjects had to say whether a sen-

tence was representative of the information conveyed by

a trait), the following modifications were made. 1. One of

the four traits was changed: the highly descriptive traits

were the same (emotional and shy), but the highly evalu-

ative traits were sociable and honest; 2. Each trait was as-

sociated with 24 behaviors from either the OB register or

the TB register. In each case, half the behaviors were pro-

totypical of the trait and the other half were not prototyp-

ical; 3. In one of the two experimental conditions (set-ting condition), the behavior (TB or OB) was placed in

a social setting that was relevant to the trait in question

(e.g., At a party, he enjoys talking to everyone). Thus,

a task that was purely metalinguistic in one condition (no

setting), took on social significance in the other condi-

tion via the introduction of a situational context. The so-

cial settings chosen were of course based on pre-tests.

As in Study 4, reaction time was recorded. The statis-

tical analysis revealed that for the two evaluative traits,

OBs gave rise to shorter reaction times than did TBs in the

Table 4: (Study 5): Behaviors retrieved as a function of the inter-action between whether the behaviors were OBs or TBs and theevaluative vs descriptive nature of the instantiated trait (fromBeauvois, Dubois, Mira & Monteil, 1996, Exp. 3)

OB TB

Evaluative traits 2.68 1.59Descriptive traits 1.74 2.29


12/18



social setting condition, whereas this difference did not

exist in the no social setting condition, as already seen in

Study 4. Note that for the two descriptive traits, the OB/TB

difference was in the opposite direction: TBs always trig-

gered shorter reaction times than did OBs. In sum, as

shown by the second-order interaction, introducing a set-

ting changed the interaction found in Study 4 (observed

here in the no-setting condition) into a crossed interaction

by causing a simple effect in the evaluative-trait condition(see Table 5 showing reaction time on prototypical be-

haviors).

In Study 6b, there was one condition (called metalin-

guistic) that was strictly identical to the single condition

in Study 4. A new experimental condition (called the

known-person condition) was added. It required a pre-

test. In the pre-test, students (not the same ones as in the

first condition) were asked to name a person who came to

mind for each trait presented (the experimental traits were

included). In the main decision-making task (two weeks

later), instead of displaying the experimental traits as in

Study 4, the subject was presented with the name he/shehad given for each trait two weeks earlier. The subjects

task was to say if the sentence displayed on the first screen

was characteristic of the person whose name appeared on

the second screen. The expected behavior (OB/TB) by trait

(evaluative/descriptive) interaction was only found and

was only significant in the known-person condition, with

OBs that instantiated evaluative traits being judged faster

this time than TBs, unlike what had been found in

Study 4.

There is nothing surprising about the fact that having a

socially-oriented task strengthened the link between OBs

and evaluative traits on the one hand, and between TBs

and descriptive traits on the other. Indeed, concrete per-sons in context and in situations are what generate af-

fordances, which once generalized, form the evaluative

component of traits. It follows that these generalized af-

fordances are more readily available when the experi-

mental situation supplies cues that evoke concrete persons

or concrete social situations. One can wonder, then, if

greater evaluative-trait accessibility is not a common oc-

currence in social evaluation situations where personolo-

gy is the underlying explanatory base.

Study 7. Work-related social judgments

In the social world, there are people whose job involves

judging other persons for the purposes of determining

what actions to take towards those persons. Their occu-

pation is thus very representative of the conception of per-

sonology presented in this article. Social work is one such

job. Our hypotheses would be substantially supported if

we were to find that social workers exhibit sociocognitive

functioning that exemplifies our concepts; they would be

supported even more if those same social workers func-

tioned in a different way when placed in an unusual situ-

ation that was not conducive to affordances. This is pre-

cisely what Dubois & Tarquinio observed.

The subjects were 30 social workers. Their task con-

sisted of reading some information about a person who

had applied for a job as a home-care worker, then per-

forming a distractor task, and finally, recalling the infor-mation in a written report to be turned into a colleague

who would do the follow-up procedures. The information

given to the subjects, which to increase credibility was

presented in the form of an interview between the two so-

cial workers, included identifying information (shes

about forty years old, has two children, wears glasses, has

black hair, etc.), some neutral filler-type information (she

shops at a supermarket, etc.), some evaluative or descrip-

tive traits (between-subject variable), and OBs and TBs

(within-subject variable) related to some other evaluative

and descriptive traits not presented (within-subject vari-

able). A final between-subject independent variable wasthe information processing mode presumably induced by

the instructions. In one subject group, an uncommon pro-

cessing mode in this population was induced with pure

memorization instructions. In another group, the instruc-

tions forced the social workers to do on-line processing

(impression formation instructions) during which they

would typically make inferences as they learn about the

target. In the last group, the subjects were asked to work

as they usually did (so-called standard instructions). We

assumed first of all that there would be few differences be-

tween the impression formation condition and the stan-

dard condition. In everyday situations, judgments are known

to be based on on-line processing. In contrast, the memo-rization instructions were hypothesized to trigger different

processes. Briefly, we expected the memorization instruc-

tions to cause information to be processed in a more de-

scriptive way, whereas the other two kinds of instructions

were expected to lead to more evaluative processing. We are

only interested here in the test information that was recalled

and written up in the report (see Table 8). It goes without

saying that the social workers recalled many of the fillers.

The first finding was that the memorization instructions

led to poorer test-information recall than the other types

Table 5: (Study 6b): Time taken (in ms) to judge prototypicalOBs and TBs in a semantic decision-making task, as a functionof the presence/absence of a social setting

Evaluative traits Descriptive traitsOB TB OB TB

No social setting 2300 2273 2655 2212Social setting 2025 2263 2464 2022


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of instructions. The memorization condition also triggered

more recall of TBs than OBs. The standard instructions,

where the social workers did as usual, painted a very

different picture of the situation: information from the

evaluative register was recalled much better than infor-

mation from the descriptive register, whether it was traits

or behaviors that were at stake. The results for the im-

pression formation instructions were very similar to thoseobtained for the standard instructions.

Given that the same authors, in the same study, showed

that this pattern of results was still found in a report writ-

ten up a week later by the same social workers, and that

Tarquinio (1998) was able to show how the manipulation

of OBs increased over the three years of special social-

work training, we can contend that the kind of evaluations

social workers do exemplifies an important principle in

how personological concepts operate, as we have tried to

illustrate through this series of experiments, namely, that

the generalization of affordances is an evaluative phe-

nomenon.

OBs generate more discriminatory socialjudgments

Study 8. Judgments at zero acquaintance

Evaluative traits can thus be regarded as generalized af-

fordances, i.e., as generalizations of a process at play dur-

ing real-world, non-symbolic contact between a subject

and an object. Clearly, mental representations do not give

rise to affordances; only real objects in front of real peo-

ple do. It follows that because personological concepts like

OBs are at the nearest point of this subject/object contact,they will lead to more discriminating judgments than per-

sonological concepts that operate solely within mental

representations, as do traits or even TBs, where the sub-

ject may be a mere observer.

Research on judgments at zero acquaintance (person-

ological judgments made from a picture of the target or a

silent video clip) has shown that such judgments are not

always based on pure figments of the imagination (see

Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997): certain traits (e.g. dominance,

extroversion, etc.) seem to obtain some degree of consen-

sus among judges, and even the targets self-descriptions

sometimes confirm the judges opinions. However, zero-

acquaintance studies have been limited to a small number

of traits, and even when the results are significant, the

agreement rate is not particularly impressing. This brings

us to the question of whether using OBs as the assessment

criteria would make such judgments more discriminating,

and whether a wider range of traits could be used. Study

8 was conducted to explore this idea.

Forty-eight students had to observe 12 targets (6 men

and 6 women) presented in silent video clips lasting 78

seconds. The clips showed a target conversing with an-

other person who was out of sight. Only the upper half of

the targets body was visible. The setting was chosen to

be as neutral as possible so as not to induce a socially-sig-

nificant situational representation. The target presentation

order varied across subjects. The subjects task was to rate

each target on twelve 7-point judgment scales. For a thirdof the subjects, the scales corresponded to 12 traits (hon-

est, liar, authoritarian, etc.), for another third, to 12 TBs

that instantiated the above traits, and for the last third, 12

OBs that also instantiated those traits. The 12 traits were

related either to affective value (F1 in Osgoods VPA mod-

el) or to social value (dynamism, F2 and F3 in the Osgood

VPA model; for the affective/social value distinction, see

Beauvois, Dubois & Peeters, 1999). The traits, OBs, and

TBs were selected on the basis of a pre-test that gave us

triplets in which the OB and TB behaviors were judged to

be very typical of the trait and had comparable trait/be-

havior association frequencies.The data was processed with a view to answering three

questions. The first was whether trait-based, TB-based, or

OB-based judgments would generate more differentiated

target portrayals (greater profile differences across scales).

To answer this question, we calculated the gap for each

target between the highest rating received no matter what

trait, TB, or OB earned it and the lowest rating received

again, no matter what trait, TB, or OB was responsible.

This first analysis yielded a significant effect of the trait/

TB/OB variable. In short, TBs were more effective than

traits (respectively m = 3.9; m = 3.22). OBs results were

in an intermediate position (m = 3.52). Our second ques-

tion was whether the degree of differentiation between thetargets depended upon whether traits, TBs, or OBs were

used. To answer this question, we calculated the gap be-

tween the rating of the target who received the highest rat-

ing and the rating of the target who received the lowest

rating, for each trait (vs. each TB vs. each OB). Another

way of wording this question is: did a given criterion (trait,

TB, or OB) clearly discriminate the 12 targets? If the first

question is relevant in psychological description, this sec-

ond question is especially relevant in evaluations, where

people must be differentiated (the good ones have to be

Table 6: (Study 7): Information retrieved by social workers in areport to be given to a colleague (from Dubois & Tarquinio, 1998)

Evalua- Descrip- Mean OB TB Meantive tive

Memorization .66 .66 .66 .41 1.0 .70

One-line 1.72 .77 1.28 1.06 .59 .82Standard 2.08 1.08 1.57 1.01 .75 .88Mean 1.52 .84 .83 .78


14/18



separated from the bad ones, the ones you hire from the

ones you eliminate, and so forth). So we expected the ef-

fectiveness of OBs to show up in the answer to this ques-

tion, which it did. The between-target discrepancies were

indeed greater when targets were judged with OBs (m =

5.25) than when they were judged with TBs (m = 4.73) or

traits (m = 4.43). A third question was that of consensus.

The consensus in zero acquaintance judgments was as-

sessed by the ratio: Mean Square of the targets variable /Mean Square of the judges variable. It appears that con-

sensus was important only for traits related to social (ver-

sus affective) value and when OBs were objects of judg-

ment (see Table 7).

These are only the initial results of our ongoing research

project. They are nonetheless quite useful, for two rea-

sons. First, they show that the conception proposed here

can be used to study zero acquaintance with a wider range

of traits than available so far. Second, they show that when

subjects are asked to put themselves in a target-contact sit-

uation that is as close to reality as they can, which occurs

when the judgment criterion is an OB, evaluative effi-ciency is enhanced, a fact already suggested by past find-

ings on judgments of sexual availability at zero acquain-

tance (Gangestad, Simpson, DiGeronimo & Biek, 1992).

The concept of generalized affordances becomes all the

more significant here, precisely because it provides the

link between the real contacts people have with objects,

and the personological representations they build in their

minds of those objects.

DiscussionWhat reality encodes personology?

Our conception of the meaning of traits grants a major role

to the behaviors of others towards the persons to whom

the traits apply (operationally: OBs). OBs are what con-

vey the utility or social value of persons, and form the core

of evaluative knowledge. The studies presented above

show that for the most highly evaluative traits which are

also the ones most commonly used the OB component

can be as accessible as the descriptive component com-

posed of the behaviors of the target persons themselves

(operationally: TBs), the only component considered in

social cognition research until now. These studies also

show that the evaluative component of traits is a powerful

organizing principle underlying mental representations of

persons. Another important finding is that the evaluative

component is elicited more in social contexts, especially

in work-related evaluations. Finally, they show that the

evaluative component is at the peak of its efficiency in the

immediate apprehension of persons, where it proves to be

more discriminating than the descriptive component. This

body of findings justifies our emphasis on the behaviors

of others towards targets (OBs). But this is not the key

point in our conception. We would like to conclude here

by coming back to this comprehensive conception to show

that it provides some solutions to questions that one could

direct at any pragmatic conception, as Funder (1995) did,

and to which the Gibsonian purist answers are not alwayssatisfactory.

Personology as evaluative knowledge

Saying that a trait is based on a set of behaviors that one

can or must exhibit towards the possessor of that trait as

suggested by the generalized affordance concept and the

experimental demonstration of the importance of OBs

means accepting the idea that one of the direct, non-de-

rived functions of personology is to inform us about what

we can do to or with people. This is what an analysis of

the cognitive-epistemological construction of traits ledone of the present authors to see as the evaluative func-

tion of traits, and a fortiori, of personology (Beauvois,

1976, 1984, 1990). Indeed, using a trait to say what one

can or must do to a person or how one can or must act with

or towards a person amounts to directly stating his/her util-

ity or social value in past actions or possible future ones.

People throw away or ignore worthless objects; people

seek, collect, or display valuable ones.

The choice of the term evaluative to denote this

knowledge-building process may be surprising. Indeed,

this term already refers to something else in the psycho-

social literature, where it is virtually always associated

with the affective register. The evaluative component ofthe connotation of words in general, and of trait words in

particular, is regarded as an element of their affective or

emotional significance (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum,

1957; Osgood, 1962; Osgood, May & Miron, 1975), so

widely relied upon in research on implicit personality the-

ories (see Kim & Rosenberg, 1980). Hence, the common

use of the expression the evaluative component of trait

words is in fact equivalent to saying the feeling of at-

traction or revulsion that these words elicit (or that is elicit-

ed by the TBs they cause one to expect). In truth, for a re-

Table 7: Consensus in zero acquaintance judgments (TargetsMean Square / Judges Mean Square)

traits loadingAffective value Social value

traits .12 .21

TBs .05 .18OBs .05 .35


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searcher who does not agree with the idea that the value

of things is determined solely by human desire, the word

affective would be more suitable than evaluative for

this meaning. The fact remains that the common usage of

the term evaluative does not require much of a cogni-

tive analysis, and does not associate the evaluation process

to a specific knowledge register. This is undoubtedly why

evaluative processes have not captured much attention on

the part of social cognition theorists (the word value is

not listed in the index of the now-classical Fiske & Tay-

lor, 1991).

Yet it seems quite clear that OBs give rise to genuine,

trait-conveyed knowledge. We agree that this knowledge

is sometimes inferred from descriptive target knowledge,

which we can assume, like everyone else, is supplied by

TB processing. We also agree in this case that people en-

gage in a sort of calculation process to figure out the eval-

uative implications of the descriptive knowledge furnishedby the trait, in the typical way proposed by Srull & Wyer

(1989). This probably paints a fairly true picture of what

we have called more-or-less descriptive3 traits (e.g. shy,

talkative). But it also holds true for more-or-less evalua-

tive traits (e.g. honest, likeable, sociable), for which the

information supplied by OBs seems to be as directly ac-

cessible as that supplied by TBs, and which does not lead

to the calculation of the evaluative implications since

the evaluation is supplied directly. These are the traits one

can regard as generalized affordances. Note that we are

not dealing here with a few odd traits with some sort of

secondary status, ones that happen to serve the purposesof our argumentation. Far from it. These traits are very

common in psychological descriptions, making them in

fact more evaluative than descriptive in nature (Beauvois,

1988). It thus seems legitimate to claim that the kind of

directly-accessible trait-conveyed knowledge that tells us

what to do or how to act with people is evaluative knowl-

edge (see Beauvois, 1990, 1994; Beauvois & Dubois,

1991, 1992, 1993). This kind of knowledge gives us a pret-

ty good idea of the value or utility of people in the social

settings that might exist in our environment.

Though evaluative, is personologicalknowledge realistic?

Let us be the devils advocate for a while. A proponent of

the axiom Man is a scientist (an axiom that has been

criticized, supplemented, qualified but never with-

drawn from psychosocial metatheory) might analyze this

conception as Funder (1995) analyzed pragmatic views of

accuracy: generalized affordances and the evaluative

knowledge that results from them are not knowledge of

the real properties of a target. They result more from oth-

er peoples personal interest in a target, than from an in-

formed observation of the targets behaviors or from in-

ferences about what that target is like. This analysis is part-

ly true and partly false. Below we shall use the example

of the edibility of a product, since this trait is akin to a

generalized affordance in personology (see McArthur &

Baron, 1983).

The devils advocate is partly right. A generalized af-

fordance in the form of a register of othersbehaviors (OB)

cannot be regarded as a descriptive property of an object

in Funders sense of the term, any more than an affordance

in context can. We have already stressed that an affordance

captures some of an objects characteristics, those that al-

low people to act in accordance with their goals, but thesecharacteristics are only encoded and labelled with respect

to those goals. Seen as a generalized affordance, honesty,

like edibility, mainly stands for a set of goals that one can

reach with the target. However, these goals are not a prop-

erty of that target as a known object, any more, in any

case, than the capability of being eaten by those who are

hungry or who like it is a descriptive property of the mus-

cle of a lamb for example.

But this analysis is also partly false, for two very dif-

ferent reasons. The first is related to the underlying con-

ception of social reality. Note that the statement that edi-

bility is not a property of the object in question here, wouldsimply be false if, rather than the muscle of a lamb, we

spoke of its meat. A muscle is a natural object studied

by a physiologist. Meat is an object of social reality: It is

a muscle inserted in a culture and in a set of social re-

lationships, here, ones between sellers and consumers. In

short, it is a muscle envisaged and defined from the stand-

point of its potential social utility. In this light, edibility

becomes a property of this particular object of our social

reality (meat). It is even a defining property: if meat can

be more or less juicy, it is edible by definition. To get back

to generalized affordances and to honesty, in all likelihood

we are dealing here with true properties of people, no

longer seen asHomo Sapiens Sapiens but as known socialobjects, as human beings inserted in a culture and in a net-

work of social contexts, human beings envisaged and de-

fined with respect to the social utility they are likely to

have. The lack of a linguistic distinction equivalent to the

muscle/meat distinction should not let us forget that peo-

ple are more readily consumers who have some knowl-

edge of product utility than they are physiologists whose

epistemological mission is precisely to break away from

those utilities. Why, when dealing with human beings,

would people just naturally lend themselves to acting like

3 We prefer today to speak of more-or-less descriptive (orof more-or-less evaluative traits rather than of descriptive(or evaluative) ones as in the past.


16/18



physiologists? If these considerations are well-founded,

one can contend that personology indeed supplies the

properties of persons, but of persons as social objects.

More than the tool of scientific psychologists, personolo-

gy is a tool of teachers, parents, human resource managers,

supervisors, and so on. It is a tool used to act upon social

objects defined by social relationships in our example,

the pupils, the children (not the offspring ofHomo Sapi-

ens Sapiens), the job applicants, the subordinates and it

is in this sense that the efficiency of that object must be

judged. In this noteworthy point of view, the famous big

five often held to be proof of peoples ability to describe

themselves and describe others on the basis of a universal

personality structure (Sneed, McCrae & Funder, 1998) (a

structure we would willingly say was the personality of

Homo Sapiens Sapiens in the era of civilizations) are not

void of social utility but are individually endowed with a

positive utility pole and a negative utility pole (obvious-ly, agreeable people are more valuable than nasty ones;

No. 3 in the big five: agreeableness).

The devils advocate is probably wrong on another

point, an epistemologically more traditional one. A gen-

eralized affordance does indeed convey information about

the nature of a target (about the muscle, not just the

meat). It is not because certain target characteristics have

been integrated into a utilitarian label (edible, honest) that

they have been completely eliminated from the knowl-

edge-building process. They are merely transformed by

the utilitarian or evaluative mode of thinking. This is prob-

ably what Zebrowitz & Collins (1997) meant when theysaid that an affordance is not in the eye of the judge. A

formal representation of the trait-construction process,

even a rudimentary one, could help us explain this idea

(see Beauvois, 1976). A long-standing tradition leads us

to posit behavior (B) as hinging on an interaction between

the characteristics carried by the person (Cp) and the char-

acteristics of the situation and environment (Cs) (Argyle

& Little, 1972; Bowers, 1973; Endler, 1975; Lewin, 1935):

1) B = f (Cp1 Cp2 x Cpn Cs1 Cs2 Csn)

Intuitive psychology is at a loss in the face of this inter-

action. Firstly, because of the fact that it puts the people

as figures upon the ground it leads intuitive psychologists

to neglect the situation (and especially the environment)in which they themselves are acting. Secondly, there is a

problem because the social objects they are appraising

(the pupils, the children, the subordinates, ) are defined

in a particular realm of social relations and contexts. Hence

the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977), also called

the correspondence bias by Jones et al. (Jones, 1990),

which consists of overlooking the characteristics of the

situation and the environment:

2) B = f (Cp1*Cp2*Cpn)4

A third problem is that the lighter cognitive load en-

abled by the discounting principle, added to the linguistic

shortcuts achieved by using the same word for the act and

the person (Nisbett & Ross, 1980), discourages them from

looking for more than one characteristic, especially when

it comes to frequent, favorable events. All this leads intu-

itive psychologists to search for the cause of a behavior

rather than the variables that affect it. All they have to do,

then, to be able to refer to people is find a label that has a

causal air to it, one that combines the various Cp charac-

teristics. This turns the above equation into:

3) B = f(P)

Lastly, there is a problem because what they are really

interested in is not behavior Bper se (the object that sci-

entific psychology studies), but the value that behavior has

(vB). The intuitive psychologist does not really care about

what someone does in a given setting, but rather whetherhe/she does it well or does it poorly, in the here and now:

4) vB = f(P)

Accepting Equation 1 requires agreeing that what re-

main

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Affordance Dubois Et Beauvois