The impact of pictures on narrative- and list-based impression formation: A process interference model

Pictures can often facilitate the comprehension of a person’s behavioral descriptions. However, this is not always the case. When the implications of several different behaviors at various points in time must be combined to form an overall impression of someone, the effect of pictures on this impression depends on how the behavioral descriptions are presented. When the events in a person’s life are conveyed in a narrative that indicates the order in which they occurred, people are likely to defer an evaluation of the individual until the story is complete. In this case, pictures facilitate the construction of the story and increase the extremity of the impressions that are based on it. When the same events are presented in an ostensibly unordered list, however, recipients perform an on-line integration of the evaluative implications of each piece of information as it is presented. Pictures are often irrelevant to this semantic integration process and distract recipients from performing it effectively, resulting in a decrease in the extremity of evaluations. Four experiments confirmed these effects and the processes and mental representations that underlie them.