For example, if someone sees someone present an academic talk energetically and presumes that energy is linked to intelligence, the perceiver will likely infer that the other person is intelligent (Dunning, 1995). These implicit personality theories guide inferences that social perceivers make of other people.
For instance, someone may want to correlate warmth with generosity, or a sense of humor with intelligence. Implicit personality theories refer to individuals’ notions about what personality characteristics tend to co-occur in people. Implicit personality theories play an important role in making judgments concerning how much we trust others in social relationships as well as in our stereotyping of broad groups.Some psychologists have argued that implicit personality theories have a linguistic basis.Psychologists have structured implicit personality theories around concepts such as centrality, additivity, and complexity.Psychologists have debated methods for measuring implicit personality theories and have devised various ways of finding similarities between the implicit personality theories of large groups of individuals.There are two main branches in implicit personality theory research: the first concerned with the role that bias plays in how people perceive others on the macro level, and the second with individual differences in how people perceive others.For example, someone may associate sternness with coldness or humor with intelligence. Implicit personality theories describe how individuals think of individual traits as relating to and occurring with each other.