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Enhancing the authenticity of assessments through grounding in first impressions

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-11-14, 14:54 authored by Bogdana Huma
This article examines first impressions through a discursive and interactional lens. Until now, social psychologists have studied first impressions in laboratory conditions, in isolation from their natural environment, thus overseeing their discursive roles as devices for managing situated interactional concerns. I examine fragments of text and talk in which individuals spontaneously invoke first impressions of other persons as part of assessment activities in settings where the authenticity of speakers’ stances might be threatened: (1) in activities with inbuilt evaluative components and (2) in sequential contexts where recipients have been withholding affiliation to speakers’ actions. I discuss the relationship between authenticity, as a type of credibility issue related to intersubjective trouble, and the characteristics of first impression assessments, which render them useful for dealing with this specific credibility concern. I identify four features of first impression assessments which make them effective in enhancing authenticity: witness positioning (Potter, 1996, Representing reality: Discourse, rhetoric and social construction, Sage, London), (dis)location in time and space, automaticity, and extreme formulations (Edwards, 2003, Analyzing race talk: Multidisciplinary perspectives on the research interview, Cambridge University Press, New York).

Funding

European Social Fund. Grant Number: SOPHRD 80765

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

British Journal of Social Psychology

Volume

-

Pages

- - - (-)

Citation

HUMA, B., 2015. Enhancing the authenticity of assessments through grounding in first impressions. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54(3), pp.405-424.

Publisher

Wiley © The British Psychological Society

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: HUMA, B., 2015. Enhancing the authenticity of assessments through grounding in first impressions. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54(3), pp.405-424., which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12089. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving."

ISSN

0144-6665

Language

  • en