The Diagnostic Impact of Base-Rate Beliefs

This study aims at testing the impact of base-rate beliefs on impression-formation. We rely on an impression-formation paradigm, where participants can sample up to 8 short summaries of everyday behaviour. The summaries are either positive or negative and either agentic or communal. For each target person, they can decide for themselves, at which point they want to stop the sequence of behavioural information (between 1 and 8 behavioural summaries). Afterwards they are asked for third-party sympathy judgements on the target person and to judge their confidence in this judgement. Beliefs in the general likeability of the target individuals is manipulated by (1) the instructions and (2) by 8 learning trials. unknown other