Interpersonal Attraction and the Perception of Attitudinal Feedback.

One common laboratory manipulation in interpersonal attraction has been the exchange of reinforcements in the form of similar or dissimilar attitude statements. The first impression should influence not only attraction responses and subsequent behavior, but also should influence the perception of subsequent information received in the course of an interaction. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the sequential perception of information received. The factors of expectancy, sequential presentation and context effects were involved in this study. Ninety college students exchanged attitude viewpoints verbally after first receiving written similarity information. Significant effects for attraction and perception of attitudes were found for verbal interaction but not for the prior attitude information. The discussion notes this unexpected result, and several suggestions are offered to explain these results. Limited evidence is seen for the presence of perceptual distortion in this study. (Author)