Changing impressions: Moral character dominates impression updating

Research suggests that morality, sociability, and competence exert different effects on impression formation and that morality forms the primary basis for the global evaluation of others. However, prior work has almost exclusively focused on “first” impressions, overlooking that social interactions require flexible updating of initial evaluations. Three experiments tested whether impression updating is influenced by morality, sociability, and competence characteristics to the same extent. Participants were asked to revise their impressions of an individual in light of new and inconsistent information pertaining to his morality, sociability or competence. Results showed that morality was perceived as more informative of interpersonal intentions; therefore a greater impression change occurred when moral information (vs. sociability or competence information) was added to what was previously learned about an individual. Our findings reveal that the key role of morality in social cognition goes beyond the formation of initial evaluations by influencing the updating of such first impressions.