The Role of Moral Information in Changing Mental Representations
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
When meeting new people, individuals spontaneously form impressions of them. These impressions can be surprisingly resistant to change except when individuals are provided with information that allows them to reinterpret their prior evaluations (Mann & Ferguson, 2015). Using reverse correlation, a data-driven technique to visualize mental representations, this study investigated whether the mental representations people form of novel others are subject to the same sort of updating that can occur following exposure to information that casts doubt on our prior evaluations. Specifically, we examined how participants' mental representations of a fictional character, accused of infanticide in a TV miniseries of the Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None, changes based on moral information provided in three conditions (a) positive (she’s falsely accused), (b) negative (she’s rightfully accused), or (c) after reinterpretation (she’s falsely accused followed by evidence that she was rightfully accused). After watching one hour of edited video, eighty-two participants' mental representations of the character were measured. The results showed that the mental representations of the character were rated as more trustworthy for participants in the positive video condition, however after reinterpretation, the mental representation changed to be in line with the negative condition. Thus, we show that the reinterpretation information provided to participants influenced their prior impressions of the character's physical appearance, effectively reversing their mental representation. This study extends our understanding of mental representation and demonstrates the importance of moral character in person perception. Future studies can look at intergroup differences in mental representation and how novel information might change these representations.
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Keywords
mental representation, reverse correlation, moral, movie, personality rating