Understanding the process of impression formation has been one of the most perplexing concerns for human beings ever since the first sociologists arrived at the conclusion that impressions were a result of a complicated metacognitive physiological process rather than simply a taken-for-granted thing. People’s perceptions and descriptions of those who surround them are conspicuously diverse and change with the times. In contrast to people’s perception of physical objects and properties, their perception of other humans has nothing to do with physically objective reality. It is widely believed that the qualities people see in others are largely assumed, felt, and inferred. Theories that underpin methodology and sociology of impression formation are legion and range from the approaches of such canonical researchers as Edward Thorndike and Solomon Asch to Lee Cronbach’s seminal paper on accuracy in impression formation. For the purposes of this paper, Solomon Asch’s iconoclastic research into impression formation has been analyzed. After a concise, yet thorough, review of Asch’s ideas, the present paper segues into a discussion of the bedrock principles underlying impression formation in online settings. The bottom line is that impressions formed on the basis of a person’s social network profile are as strong, consensual, and accurate as those formed in offline environments.

Solomon Asch was an American social psychologist of Polish extraction. He arrived in the US in 1920 and graduated from Columbia University, one of the best academic pedigrees acceptable for an American psychologist. It was in the university that Asch began making first discreet forays into social psychology, exploring gestalt approaches to association, learning, perception, and thinking. Plunged into the rarefied atmosphere of university in the capacity of a faculty member, Asch spent long years trying to unravel the mystery of how impressions formed. The specialist was steadfast in his belief that character traits played an important role in the process of impression formation, and later confirmed this hypothesis experimentally. Asch’s theory explains how individuals use pieces of information and certain cues to come up with a general impression. Forming impression is impossible without the simultaneous use of affective, cognitive, and perceptual processes of making judgments about a person. The expert asked the participants of his studies to form an impression of a hypothetical individual on the basis of several characteristics attributed to them by Asch himself. In such experiments, Asch demonstrated that the meaning of personality trait hinged heavily on other attributes of the same person. Thus, the intelligence of a person who was “intelligent and warm” was different from the intelligence of an “intelligent and cold” person. It should be noted that Asch was at loggerheads with many of his counterparts, because his views ran counter to the so-called behaviorist elementism prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, thanks to the revolutionary character of his inferences and the latitude of his thought in general, Asch became a luminary of social psychology and his set of convictions continues to resonate in modern psychology. Likewise, Asch’s method of comparing and contrasting impressions generated by descriptions varying only in one characteristic is still widely popular in the academic circles.

Judging by the highest standards, the research into impression formation snowballed from there and has since led to numerous breakthroughs and discoveries. At the same time, researchers dealing with impression formation theory have encountered a new problem recently. Today, as many of the traditionally real-life processes and interactions move to the digital world, the question of how impressions form in online settings needs to be answered with a certain degree of urgency. Due to the relative newness of this social domain, there is still a dearth of both published and online research studies. Nevertheless, more and more researchers commit themselves to answer the question of how people judge others’ personality based on their profiles in online social networks and how they manage these impressions henceforth. The existing research tends to include both broad and contextualized personality traits, uses natural rather than artificial social networking profiles as stimulus material, combines experimental and naturalistic design, measures a broad array of social network perceptions, and provides an exhaustive evaluation of the myriad behavioral cues ingrained in social networking profiles by the coders. Research carried out by a cohort of experts vividly shows various interpersonal perception and impression formation phenomena present in social networks. Indeed, for many people, a mere glimpse at another person’s social networking profile is often enough to form an impression of them. Likewise, many people, especially adolescents and those who seek to gain positive image online, spend much time thinking about how their profiles are viewed by other social network users. Hence, there are ample grounds to assert that impression formation is an indispensable element of people’s social functioning in online environments.

Today, billions of people around the world use social networks as their vicarious form of social life, either auxiliary or the only one. Under these circumstances, the need to study impression formation in online settings is undisputed. Curiously enough, social networks per se offer a cornucopia of opportunities for investigating interpersonal perception. Indeed, social networks enable users to behave, communicate, and interact with one another in a variety of ways. User can, inter alia, connect to and converse with others, present their social relationships and preferences, etc. Since social networks are a new phenomenon, they constitute an ideal environment or the expression of individual differences in users. Being routinely used for communication, social networks edifyingly capture crucial aspects of user’s everyday interactions and behaviors. Whereas participants know that they are involved in a psychological experiment in most laboratory studies, dissecting social networking profiles makes possible the evaluation of a wide range of naturally occurring behaviors. In other words, participants do not know that they are being studied and, thus, behave naturally. All in all, social networks can be used as a tool for standardized empirical analysis. As social networks penetrate even the most rural areas, related research into interpersonal perception and impression formation on social networking websites expands rapidly.

The expert asks a rhetorical question whether people’s first impressions of others in social networks are as strong, consensual, and accurate as in offline settings, such as tête-à-tête meetings. Although there is a paucity of research into this area, experts overwhelmingly agree that social network user’s impressions of another user’s profile are tantamount in value to those formed in offline environments. Similarly, researchers concur that online impressions are as accurate as those formed in traditional contexts. Social networking is the vehicle that enables users to get involved in impression management. Indeed, many people use their social network profiles in such a way as to manage impressions they evoke in other users. However, by glossing over their unfavorable personality traits or otherwise self-idealizing themselves on Facebook and other similar social networks, users do not always contrive to control impressions of others. One way or the other, researchers agree that social networks are conducive rather than inimical to the formation of a valid and long-lasting impression of users based on their profiles even at zero acquaintance.

Social networks as well as other online environments with a focus on the expression of personal content have been proved to promote precise impression of openness. In addition to personality traits, certain types of information about users available online, such as personal interests and physical appearance of an individual, may be indicative of personality. In other words, impression formation is contingent on these types of information, which in their turn may vary with regard to the quality and quantity of cues they reveal. It has been found that profile pictures remain one of the most evocative bits of information that have either benign or malign impact on impression formation depending on the circumstances. It should also be noted that different personality traits are better judged on the basis of different types of information or combinations thereof.

In conclusion, it should be noted that impression formation is an intricate physiological and psychological process wherein one person puts together all his/her feelings, notions, and ideas about another person to form an indelible impression of them. There have been a bevy of theories that purport to explain how exactly this process occurs. Solomon Asch was one of the pioneers of social psychology and his ideas were truly revolutionary for his time. Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is doubtful that Asch would have arrived at different conclusions if he worked in a different epoch. Although researchers are unanimous in their opinion that impressions formed on the basis of a person’s social network profile are as strong, consensual, and accurate as those formed in offline settings, there have been few empirical studies to make valid conclusions. Social networks and other online environments constitute a new social domain and further research into impression formation in these contexts is required. Thus far, no one has used Asch’s findings on impression formation in online settings. With the caveat that all figures in the existing surveys are largely unsubstantiated, it can at least be said that there are many similarities between online and offline impression formation.

The article was prepared by Mellissa Grey. She is an academic researcher responsible for a blog writing on https://essaysbank.com/buy-a-speech-online.