WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT PEOPLE SHAPES THE INFERENCES WE MAKE ABOUT THEIR PERSONALITIES

The ability to form impressions allows making inferences about others based on minimal, swift and automatic interactions. The verbal context (what we Know about people) could play an important role in this process. An experiment was conducted involving 95 individuals who were asked to make inferences on the personality and emotionality perceived in a mixed facial expression. Five positive words and five negative ones were used to establish the levels of the variable referred to as verbal context (negative and positive). The results revealed the person was attributed greater sociability when an individual had positive information on the person producing the facial expression. What we know about other people has a modulating effect on some aspect of the personality perceived through a facial expression, with a clearly adaptive value in the prediction of their behaviour.