The effect of interpersonal distance and background context on trait impressions

People rapidly form trait impressions of other individuals that they encounter based on their visual appearance. Such opinions are made with consensus between observers, yet external factors can also influence judgments. Here, we investigated the effects of two potentially important external factors - interpersonal distance and background context - by manipulating these variables while participants evaluated life-sized whole-person stimuli. Participants rated attractiveness, competence, dominance, and trustworthiness of target figures presented to them at near and far distances with different positively or negatively valenced backgrounds that were ambient (Experiment 1: beach vs. fire scenes) or social (Experiment 2: happy vs. disgusted flanking figures). We predicted that targets would be rated more favourably in positive vs negative background contexts, and that this effect may interact with interpersonal distance (at far distances people may rely relatively more on background cues). This is the first investigation of how these two factors jointly shape a broad set of trait impressions under naturalistic (life-sized, whole-body) viewing conditions. Results broadly confirmed a strong influence of background context tested. However, the predicted interaction with interpersonal distance was observed selectively for trustworthiness judgments in a social background context (Experiment 2). Together our findings provide first evidence of an influence of context on different trait judgments, and suggest the trait-selective differences in the integration of such cues with distance.