Non-ideal fit to a performance demand and the emergence of performance-related person categories

Three studies were conducted in order to investigate antecedents of individuals' preoccupation with person descriptors, such as personality traits, physical‐ethnic characteristics, or external characteristics, In Studies 1 and 2 subjects had to rate, for a given list of traits, how important each of the traits was as a prerequisite for performance within an academic context. Subjects who were relatively inexperienced in writing term papers (Study 1) or in taking major exams (Study 2) showed a higher mean in rated importance of the traits than did those who were relatively experienced. However, no differences between experienced and inexperienced subjects occurred if they had to rate the same trait list with respect to each trait's general desirability, i.e. where the traits were simply rated as such, without any reference to a performance realm. This finding clarifies an important aspect of the theory underlying this work. In the third study subjects were encouraged to make use of overt, visible aspects in describing how to recognize a foreign language speaker The number of physical ethnic and material characteristics mentioned in subjects' descriptions was positively correlated with the number of mistakes subjects made in a foreign‐language translation task, particularly when subjectively felt press with respect to translating was high and subjects' performance in translating was salient. Implications of these findings are discussed within a conceptual framework dwelling on the societal origins of the use of person‐descriptor terms (Wicklund, 1986a, b).