engleski

The impact of information about residential territory on impression formation

Cities tend to be divided in physical and perceptual categories named districts. There is a tendency among inhabitants to perceive a district where they live as their own territory. It was assumed that people could form different impressions about city inhabitants depending on information about their territorial origin. City of Zagreb was divided in ten dstricts.In pretest two districts were isolated according to their residential desirability (one with lowest desirability appraisal and one with the highest desirability appraisal). 91 female subjects, undergraduate students, were divided in three groups (two experimental and a control) and exposed to the short descriptions of a hypothetical person. Each description contained few general information about person. Descriptions for experimental groups differed only in the information about city district where the hypohetical person lived. Description given to control group had no information about territorial origin of the hypothetical person. After reading te stimuus story, subjects were asked to judge the hypothetical person on 13 bipolar scales of attributes. Lower ratings were obtained for person from undesirable district than for person from desirable districts of the city of Zagreb, partly suppotting the hypothesis that subjects formed different impression about people depending on their territorial origin.

impression formation; residential territory; city inhabitants

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