The Diagnostic Impact of Stable 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 12 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 12 behavioural summaries). Afterwards they are asked for third-party sympathy judgements on the target person and to judge their confidence in this judgement. General communal expectations (and thus communal diagnosticity) are assumed to be determined by victim sensitivity: People high in victim sensitivity generally expect others to be disloyal and exploitative, especially when the situation allows for exploitative behaviour. unknown other