Why Most People Disapprove of Me

Experience Sampling in Impression Formation

Denrell, Jerker

¹Stanford University.

²Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jerker Denrell, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305-5015. E-mail: [email protected].

This article has benefited from prior joint work with James March. I thank Chip Heath, James March, and Dale Miller for their extensive comments and help. I am also grateful for comments and help from Bill Barnett, Marilynn Brewer, Lawrence Brown, Glenn Carroll, Christian Czernich, Hillary Elfenbein, Christina Fang, Deborah Gruenfeld, Mike Hannan, Richard Harrison, Rod Kramer, Dan Levinthal, Steve Lippman, Anders Martin-Löf, Maggie Neal, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Patrick Regnér, Lee Ross, Zur Shapira, Udo Zander, and participants in seminars at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard Business School Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, Stockholm School of Economics, and the Wharton School of Management. Erica Carranza, Deborah Prentice, Jeff Larsen, Noah Gans, George Knox, Rachel Croson, James Shah, Paige Brazy, and Tory Higgins generously allowed me to use their data. All errors are my own.

Received Date: November 11, 2003; Revised Date: March 6, 2005; Accepted Date: March 24, 2005

Psychological Review 112(4):p 951-978, October 2005.

Individuals are typically more likely to continue to interact with people if they have a positive impression of them. This article shows how this sequential sampling feature of impression formation can explain several biases in impression formation. The underlying mechanism is the sample bias generated when the probability of interaction depends on current impressions. Because negative experiences decrease the probability of interaction, negative initial impressions are more stable than positive impressions. Negative initial impressions, however, are more likely to change for individuals who are frequently exposed to others. As a result, systematic differences in interaction patterns, due to social similarity or proximity, will produce systematic differences in impressions. This mechanism suggests an alternative explanation of several regularities in impression formation, including a negativity bias in impressions of outgroup members, systematic differences in performance evaluations, and more positive evaluations of proximate others.