The statement, “(S)he has a great personality,” has become a
cliché for saying that someone is unattractive.
How does this happen? After all,
if someone has a great personality, that is a good thing.
The negative impression comes from our ability to say things
indirectly. The philosopher H. Paul
Grice described this most clearly. He
argued that we expect people to say things that are clear, truthful, and
relevant. The idea of relevance is
particularly important. Consider a woman
who has just been set up on a blind date.
She asks her friend to describe the date. If all she gets back is, “he has a nice
personality,” then she may begin to wonder why her friend didn’t say anything
about the way he looked. This omission
is taken as evidence that he must not be very attractive.
So, it is possible to give someone a negative impression of
a person by saying something positive about them. Does this really work?
This question was addressed in a paper by Nicolas Kervyn,
Hilary Bergsieker, and Susan Fiske in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They had students imagine that they were with
a group of two other friends who were considering whether to have a new person
join their group. The group was either a
work group or a group planning a vacation together. In a work setting, it is important that
someone be conscientious and capable. In
a social setting like a vacation, it is important that someone be warm and fun
to be around.
In this scenario, participants were told that they had
missed a previous meeting with the new person, and their friends were giving
them a new description.
In a control condition, participants were told only that the
new person made a good overall impression.
In the ‘competent’ condition, participants were told that the new person
seemed smart, hard-working, and competent.
In the ‘warm’ condition, participants were told that the new person
seemed nice, sociable, and outgoing.
The results showed that people were sensitive to both what
was said about the new person as well as what was not said. When people were evaluating someone to join
their work group, their evaluation was much higher for the competent person
than for the warm person (with the control condition coming out in
between). When people were evaluating
someone to join their vacation, their evaluation of the warm person was much
higher than their evaluation of the competent person (with the control
condition again being in between).
These impressions come out in the descriptions people later
give of the new people they are evaluating.
In one study, after making all these ratings, participants described the
new person. When they were evaluating a
new person for a work group and heard that they were warm, their descriptions
conveyed that the person was probably not a hard worker. Similarly, when they evaluated a new person
for a vacation and heard that they were a hard worker, their descriptions
conveyed that the person was probably not that nice to be around.
Overall, then, we are quite sensitive to both what people
tell us directly in their words as well as what they say to us indirectly
through what they fail to say. It is
particularly interesting that these impressions may become an explicit part of
the way we think about a new person, even though they were never stated
explicitly.
