Person Perception in Environmental Context: The Influence of Residential Settings on Impressions of Their Occupants

Abstract
This study tested the hypothesis that impressions of people would be influenced by the environmental context in which they were seen. Six adults were photographed in two contrasting residential settings. College student judges rated them from those photographs for their personality traits and occupational status. The stimulus persons were judged to have more desirable traits and more prestigious occupations when they were seen in an upper middle-class residential setting than when they were seen in a lower middle-class residential setting. These findings are consistent with a view of environmental settings that includes their occupants as prominent features.

This publication has 8 references indexed in Scilit: