Author ORCID Identifier
Date of Award
Summer 7-14-2026
Document Type
Thesis (Ph.D.)
Department or Program
Psychological & Brain Sciences
First Advisor
Mark A. Thornton
Second Advisor
Jeremy R. Manning
Third Advisor
James V. Haxby
Abstract
Moments after perceiving another person, we immediately infer a wealth of information about them. Despite the complexities within our social environments, we distill an incredible magnitude of details available to us into compressed representations of other people’s minds and mannerisms. Yet research has focused largely on mapping isolated stimuli—divorced from its messy context—to the spontaneous impressions they provoke. As a result, there are many unanswered questions about how our judgments are influenced by the rich and noisy social world we inhabit. Here, I’ve leveraged two paradigms to investigate how impression formation and updating may operate when the constraints of the highly controlled laboratory setting have been interleaved with naturalistic designs. First, (Chapter 1) I take advantage of internal monologue narration in film—spoken audio representing what a character is thinking—to examine whether people use the mental states they access to inform their impressions of a target individual. This study revealed that participants were neurally aligned while listening to the same monologues—and this alignment persisted after the monologue was over. Moreover, the presence of these internal monologues causally shaped the impressions participants formed and updated about the characters. Yet, this conclusion remains limited to the individual perceiver, and leaves open the possibility that impressions may be further shaped via conferring with an interlocutor. To address this gap, (Chapter 2) I recorded dyads as they discussed their impressions of people who they, initially, formed independent impressions of. This study found that dyads’ impressions converged over the course of the experiment, for both state and trait ratings, which replicated in a second dataset. We also found, in both studies, that participants increased feelings of closeness to their partner, despite primarily discussing their impressions of others, rather than sharing information about themselves. Together, these studies demonstrate that embedding naturalistic designs with traditional experimental control allows us to continue to understand social impressions without sacrificing ecological validity.
Recommended Citation
Tepfer, Lindsey J., "DISTRIBUTED IMPRESSIONS: HOW MULTIPLE MINDS COME TOGETHER TO SHAPE PERSON PERCEPTION" (2026). Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations. 528.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/dissertations/528
