Asch's research on information combination

Classic research on the question of how people combine information to form an impression was carried out by Asch (1946). Asch gave participants in his study a list of seven personality traits, and aksed them to form an impression of a fictitious 'target-person' who had these characteristics. He found that not only were they able to do this with little difficulty, but that they were able to generate other characteristics that the target-person probably had, and guess what the target-person looked like and what job they did! This suggested that people are very good at combining information to create an pverall impression of someone else.

Asch concluded that some traits are relatively central in the impression formation process, whereas others are relatively peripheral.

Central traits, such as 'warm' and 'cold', have a particularly marked influence on the impressions, whereas the effect of peripheral ones such as 'polite' and 'blunt' is less marked.