Thinking about people: Contributions of a typological alternative to associationistic and dimensional models of person perception.

The associationistic view of person perception states that people are perceived in terms of trait covariations. The dimensional view maintains that others are perceived by means of a limited number of dimensions. In contrast, he typological view is that others are perceived in terms of person types, and traits within a given person type have a unique interactive r lation. In Experi-ment l, associationistic, dimensional, nd typological representations f implicit personality he-ories were empirically derived. The derived stimuli were used in Experiment 2, which examined the effects of person type membership on impression priming and perceived trait belongingness, controlling for associationistic and dimensional f ctors. As expected, results validated the unique contribution fa typological pproach to person perception. Implications of the present findings for the implicit personality theory, stereotype, and person memory literatures are discussed. People constitute important categories of objects. It is of no surprise, then, that thinking about people is such a pervasive phenomenon. We routinely form impressions ofother people's personalities, make predictions about their behavior, wonder about their intentions, and evaluate their performance out-