Harold Kelly's Warm Cold Effect

Harold H. Kelly’s (1950) research report, The warm cold variable in first impressions of persons, investigates early judgments, such as preconceived expectations one may have about another based on what one has been told, (or in the case of RateMyProfessor.com, read) the hypothesis also goes into how these early judgments influence interaction with someone. The experiment took place with 55 subjects all of whom were students at MIT. There were two different types of notes distributed among the participants at random. The notes described the stimulus (a professor that would be taking over for the previous professor who was out of town for the time being), whether the participants received notes describing the stimulus as “warm” or “cold”. (Independent variable). The end result of how the notes influenced how often participants interacted with the stimulus and whether at the end of the interaction their expectations influenced how they rated the stimulus was then measured and the results recorded. (Dependent variable). …show more content…
An important piece the study found is that not only did the students who were in the “cold” variable give the teacher poor ratings and choose to not participate in class they also unknowingly reinforced their preconceived notions about the teacher, having an idea about someone does not make you correct if you choose to not engage in a behavior that could potentially change those ideas. The same could be said for the positive side, having “warm” ideas about someone does not mean these ideas are correct because there is no way to prove they are incorrect, which brings in the concept of schemas and the power of self fulfilling