There's a new colleague at the office that you have yet to meet and people are gossiping about them in the break room. What information might you hope to hear?
Humans are remarkably talented at forming fast impressions of other humans—we've evolved to do it! And it turns out that how we perceive others depends quite a bit on the context. If you were passing this new colleague in a dark alley at night or were asked to care for them when they were sick, would you still be interested in the same information about them?
This program of research investigates how our perceptions of others are shaped by situational context, including differences in place (e.g., office versus dark alley) and person (e.g., adult versus child).
What we want to know about other people depends on the situation.
Billet, M. I., McCall, H. C., & Schaller, M. (2022). What motives do people most want to know about when meeting another person? An investigation into prioritization of information about seven fundamental motives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(4), 495–509. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211069468
As an undergraduate student, I had the pleasure of conducting a study with Professor Cynthia Fekken. I wanted to know why bad people with bad reputations are still able to gain people's trust. After all, the literature on the Dark Triad of personality (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) is full of examples of bad people hurting others, precisely because they are able to gain their trust.
One idea is that we judge bad people to be good at doing bad things (not horribly bad things, but bad things that a regular university student might find themselves interested in doing from time to time—throwing keg parties, lying to professors, you know!) Anyways, we didn't find any evidence for that idea.
We did find that bad people who propose to do good things are judged to be more trustworthy than good people who propose to do bad things. This tendency is the sort of thing that a sweet-talking bad person could take advantage of. If this interests you, check out our paper!
We trust bad people when they say they are going to do good things.
Billet, M. I., & Fekken, G. C. (2020). The influence of instrumentality in trusting Dark Triad members. Personality and Individual Differences, 154, 109690. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109690