Give me a I.M.P.R.E.S.S.I.O.N., What's that spell?

Being a cheerleading coach is exhausting. I don’t know if any of you guys have noticed, when or if you are exposed to 11-13 year old pre-teen girls, you realize really quickly how not all, but the majority of those children are very much into what’s in style, becoming popular, and doing teenage things. It’s just that age where they are now in middle school, and they think they know everything. Heck, we were all there just 10 years ago, I know I was! Except flip phones were cool and if you could get the high score on snake you were on of the coolest kids around. (I still think flip phones are pretty cool. Although I may be bias since I got a go-phone flip from Wal-Mart for twenty bucks since my iPhones don’t last more than a few months) Anyways, as a coach, I get to spend a few hours teaching the oldest girls (and two guys this past year) in our organization higher level tumbling, dance, cheer, and stunting, but it became apparent within the first day of practice who would be my trouble makers, my leaders, my submissive kids, and my listeners. I was able to form my impressions of the kids pretty quickly and relatively accurate now looking back. Without even realizing it though, I was using “impression formation” which occurs when we use small amounts of visual and physical cues to create big and possibly long lasting impressions of others (Anderson, 1968).

According to Anderson, you can actually place a value onto impressions by using a 7-point scale, and asking participants to rate a total of 555 traits, then averaging the total for each trait. Anderson (1968) called this a trait’s “scale value”. Anderson’s 1968 study showed that traits such as “sincere” are rated highly on the scale, whereas traits such as “liar” were on the low end of the scale, meaning we actually have an unconscious value system for traits, which we use to judge and create our perceptions of others during impression formation. The idea of impression formation also goes hand in hand with the theory of information integration theory (Anderson, 1981). Anderson’s 1981 theory states that the impressions we form of others. This rational theory includes two ideas, 1) That we form impressions based on the temperament we observe and 2) we use a weighted average to determine our impressions, and that the higher the average, the more positive the impression (Kashima & Kerekes, 1994). I was able to use the impressions I had of each of the kids to modify my coaching style dependent upon which child I was addressing, to make my coaching and their learning process more efficient. Dr. Giuliano’s February 19^th lecture made it clear now that impressions are very resistant to change and that all of the other information we receive from a person coordinates with their first impressions. This is probably why my view of the kid’s has not changed much from the first day I met them, although, no matter what their impression trait values, they all still have an equal place in my heart.

When I can find their competition video from this year I will post it! :) For now...here is a photo of Allyson (my roomate) and I putting Liz in a one hand prep. This photo is when they won fist place at regionals November 2012. They went on to Nationals hosted by ESPN at Disney World Florida and placed 6th in the nation this past December. Most of them are moving on to all-star teams, but I was a proud coach and enjoyed the season.

Until next blog,

Your Socia Psychista

WORD COUNT: 606

Anderson, N. H. (1968). Likeableness ratings of 555 personality-trait words. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 272-279.

Anderson, N.H. (1981). Foundations of information integration theory. San Diego, CA. Academic Press

Kashima, Y., Kerekes, A. R. Z. (1994). A distributed memory model of observing phenomena in  person impression formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 407-455.

T. Giuliano, Olin building lecture, February 19, 2013.