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Impression Management: It is also called as self-presentation. It 
deals with the various methods and efforts that individuals use to 
produce a favorable impression about himself/herself on others. We 
often attempt to influence others by projecting ourselves in ways 
which will present us in a favorable light. We often behave, act, 
dress and express ourselves in ways that produce favorable 
impressions on others. Impression Management is a skillful activity. 
Research on impression management has shown that people who 
can perform impression management successfully are often 
successful in many situations as they help others to form positive 
and good impressions about themselves. 
 

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6.3 RESEARCH BY SOLOMON ASH ON CENTRAL 
AND PERIPHERAL TRAITS IN IMPRESSION 
FORMATION : 
Solomon Asch (1946) did pioneering studies in the areas of 
Impression formation. He was heavily influenced by the work of 
Gestalt Psychologists, who believed that “the whole is greater than 
the sum of its parts” . Like Gestalt Psychologists, Solomon Asch 
held the view that we do not form impression simply by adding 
together all of the traits we observe in other persons. Rather, we 
perceive these traits in relation to one another, so that the traits 
cease to exist individually and become, instead, part of an 
integrated, dynamic whole. Asch studied impression formation by 
using a simple method. He gave individuals lists of traits 
supposedly possessed by a stranger, and then asked them to 
indicate their impression of this person by checking the traits on a 
long list that they felt fit with their impression of the stranger. 
In one of his study participants were given the following two lists. 
• Intelligent - skilful – industrious - warm – determined – practical 
- cautious. 
• Intelligent – skilful - industrious - cold - determined – practical - 
cautious. 
The above lists differed only with respect to two words: warm 
and cold. Thus, if people form impressions merely by adding 
together individual traits, the impression formed by persons 
exposed to these lists would not differ very much. The results of his 
study revealed that persons who read the list containing “warm” 
were much more likely to view the stranger as generous, happy, 
good natured, sociable, popular, and altruistic than were people 
who read the list containing “cold.”
According to Asch, the words “warm” and “cold” described 
central traits -- ones that strongly shaped overall impressions of the 
stranger and coloured the other adjectives in the lists. Asch 
obtained additional support for this view by substituting the words 
“polite” and “blunt” for “warm” and “cold.” When he did this, the 
effects on participant’s impressions of the stranger were far weaker; 
“polite” and “blunt”, it appeared, were not central words with a 
strong impact on first impressions. Thus, Central traits have a 
stronger impact on our impressions than Peripheral Traits. 
In further studies, Asch varied not the content but the order of 
adjectives of each list. For example 

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• One group read the following list. “Intelligent - industrious – 
impulsive critical- stubborn - envious”. 
• Another – group read: “Envious - stubborn - critical – impulsive -
industrious - intelligent.”
In the above list the only difference was in the order of the 
words on the two lists. Yet, again, there were larger differences in 
the impression formed by participants. For example, while 32 per 
cent of those who read the first list described the stranger as 
happy, only 5 per cent of those who read the second list did so. 
Similarly, while 52 per cent of those who read the first list described 
him as humorous, only 21 per cent of those who read the second 
list used this adjective. 
Harold Kelly (1950) replicated the studies of Solomon Ash, 
and found that central traits affect not only our ratings of others, but 
also influences our behavior. On the basis of many studies such as 
these, Asch and other researchers concluded that: 
i) 
Forming impressions of others involve more than simply 
adding together individual traits.
ii) Our perceptions of others are more than the sum of 
information (Traits) we know about others. 
iii) Individual Traits are evaluated in relation to other known 
Traits, and develop an overall picture where all the traits fit 
together consistently. 
iv) Impression formation is a coherent, unified and integrated 
process in which we take a wholistic and a global view of the 
various traits possessed by an individual.