The Role of Moral Information in Changing Mental Representation
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Date
2025-04
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Abstract
Individuals spontaneously form initial impressions of new people, which can be “undone” if individuals are provided with new 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 these mental representations are malleable and whether they can be changed following exposure to novel information in the same way that our evaluations of others has been shown to be. We examined how participants' mental representations of a fictional character, accused of infanticide in a TV miniseries And Then There Were None, change based on moral information provided in three conditions (a) positive, (b) negative, or (c) reinterpretation. After watching one hour of edited video, eighty-two participants' mental representations of the character were measured. The results showed significant differences in evaluations between the positive and negative conditions, as well as between the pre-reinterpretation and post-reinterpretation conditions. We found that the reinterpretation information provided to participants appears to influence their prior impressions of the character's physical appearance, effectively reversing their mental representation. This study extends our understanding on 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 can change these representations.
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mental representation, reverse correlation, moral, movie, personality rating