Polysemy of traits and judgment of familiar people

摘要

This paper develops a polysemic view of traits labels and outlines the fact that the same label may activate two modes of person perception (1) the agent mode is elicited by behavioural descriptions and emphasizes the role of the actor and (2) the experiencer mode is elicited by state descriptions and implies an external view of people. The experiment was designed to investigate consequences of mode induction on perception of familiar people. Participants had first to rate traits as behavioural descriptions (agent condition) or as state descriptions (experiencer condition). Then, they had to think about four familiar persons, located at the four poles of the circumplex taxonomy ('a person they like', 'a person they don't like', 'a person who has qualities to get on in life', 'a person who lacks qualities to get on in life') and to rate them on a variety of traits scales. Control participants were directly enrolled in the description phase. Results show that, compared to agent induction and control conditions, state induction weakened (1) the evaluative consistency of trait ratings within a dimension (2) the perceived differentiation between people. Consequences of the polysemic conception of traits are discussed. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.