Two Modes of Social Impressions and Their Effects on Choice

Our memories of other people shape how we interact with them. Yet, even when we forget exactly what others said or did, we often remember impressions that capture a general gist of their behavior-whether they were forthright, friendly, or funny. Drawing on fuzzy trace theory, we propose two modes of social impression formation: impressions formed based on ordinal gist ("more competent," "less competent") or categorical gist ("competent," "incompetent"). In turn, we propose that people gravitate toward the simplest representation available and that different modes of memory have distinct consequences for social decisions. Specifically, ordinal impressions lead people to make decisions based on an individual's standing relative to others, whereas categorical impressions lead people to make decisions based on discrete classifications that interpret behavior. In four experiments, participants learned about two groups of individuals who differed in their competence (Studies 1a, 2, and 3) or generosity (Study 1b). When participants encoded impressions as ordinal rankings, they preferred to hire or help a relatively good target from a low-performing group over a relatively bad target from a high-performing group, even though both targets behaved identically and accuracy was incentivized. However, when participants could use categorical boundaries to interpret behavior, this preference was eliminated. In a final experiment, changing the category participants used to encode others' generosity changed their impressions, even when accounting for memory for verbatim details. This work links social impressions to theories of mental representation in memory and judgment, highlighting how distinct representations support divergent patterns of social decision-making.