The Person and the Situation

by Lee Ross

Park (1986, 1989) found that while behaviors, affiliative memberships, attitudes, demographic information, and physical descriptions were all used with some frequency, traits (such as kind, shy, self-centered, easygoing) were more than twice as common as the next most frequent form of description. Ostrom (1975) asked college students to list the items of information they would want to know about another person in order to form an impression. Trait information accounted for 26 percent of all items listed; behavior, affiliative memberships, attitudes, and demographic and physical information together accounted for only 19 percent. Livesley and Bromley (1973) have shown that the use of trait terms increases steadily over the course of development for children in our culture, eventually becoming the most frequent type of description in free-response characterizations of other people. The meaning of the trait terms that people within a culture end up with would appear to be remarkably uniform.