History of Th eory and Research on Impression Formation 4

Hindsight is 20/20, they say derisively. It cannot isolate causes or predict the future. Th ere are no control groups, and who’s to say it could not have been otherwise. We are experimental social psychologists, plagued by counterfactuals and mistrustful of post hoc explanations. So take this brief selective history with a large grain of salt. Also note that any history of impression formation is, in part, a history of how we have viewed ourselves. More than most topics in this handbook, it has been aff ected by widespread practices in how we (the broad culture and/or the scientifi c community) describe people. We take the long view and focus broadly on early history, rather than exclusively on the most recent developments. We sketch how the research community came to believe in the things we study as “impression formation,” and provide a few interesting stories and ideas along the way. Abstract