On cognitive busyness: When person perceivers meet persons perceived
Gilbert, Pelham and Krull describe person perception as categorisation, characterisation and correction, and argue that correction is the process most easily disrupted. In the first experiment, 47 female students watched seven silent clips of a woman in a getting-acquainted conversation, in five of which she looked anxious, with discussion topics that were either anxiety-provoking or relaxing. Viewers with one task discounted and augmented her anxiety according to the topics. Viewers who expected to recall the topics later, and so rehearsed them, did not adjust, although they recalled more topics. In a second experiment, listeners who expected to give a speech of their own drew stronger dispositional inferences from an assigned speech and used the assignment less.
Gilbert, Pelham and Krull describe person perception as categorisation, characterisation and correction, and argue that correction is the process most easily disrupted. In the first experiment, 47 female students watched seven silent clips of a woman in a getting-acquainted conversation, in five of which she looked anxious, with discussion topics that were either anxiety-provoking or relaxing. Viewers with one task discounted and augmented her anxiety according to the topics. Viewers who expected to recall the topics later, and so rehearsed them, did not adjust, although they recalled more topics. In a second experiment, listeners who expected to give a speech of their own drew stronger dispositional inferences from an assigned speech and used the assignment less.
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Gilbert, D. T., Pelham, B. W., & Krull, D. S. (1988). On cognitive busyness: When person perceivers meet persons perceived. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 733-740. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.733 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.733