When the Messenger is the Message

Abstract

Although social psychologists have studied how people form impressions of others either through viewing them, listening to them speak, or reading written descriptions of them, researchers have not looked extensively at the ways in which readers form impressions of writers' personalities while reading their texts. This article reports on a series of studies in which different groups of readers were asked to respond to essays written by high school students applying for college admission. Our findings suggest that independent readers' impressions of writers' personalities overlap far more than would be expected by chance, that readers' impressions of writers' personalities can have practical consequences for writers, and that texts can be revised so as to influence, in predicted ways, the types of personality traits that readers are likely to infer.

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