I have been playing golf for the last eight years or so. It has been a big part of my life since high school, and I love being on the SU Varsity team. I don't actually watch much pro golf--I'll be the first to admit that the sport is pretty boring--but Tiger Woods has always been my favorite golfer. He is so talented and he seemed like such a good person from the beginning. In interviews and TV appearances, he was always so nice--he had a friendly personality and he always donated to charity. His warm Central Traits (Allport, 1955) or characteristics that have a powerful influence on impressions, led me to really like him. I just assumed that he was a good person all-around due to the Implicit Personality Theory (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954). That is the idea that a person's traits are linked--if we know that a person has one trait, we infer that he or she has related traits as well. Thus, the fact that Tiger was so nice caused me (and probably every other golf fan) to assume that he had high moral standards and was a role model for young people. Apparently everyone in America falsely fell victim to the Implicit Personality Theory.
When I was home for Thanksgiving break, a breaking news story came on TV saying that Tiger Woods was involved in a car accident outside of his house. Being the fan that I was, I was shocked that something so awful could happen to my favorite golfer and I hoped that he was all right. I realized at the time that the circumstances were pretty strange--he crashed at the end of his driveway in the wee hours of the morning. But I pushed the sketchiness of the situation aside and just hoped for his recovery.
When I arrived back at school after the break, one of my teammates--a fellow Tiger fan--told me about reports that he was having extramarital affairs (not just one, but nine!). I refused to believe such blasphemy! There was no way that Tiger, the moral center of golf, could do anything remotely questionable. Despite my friend's "proof" (who would have ever thought US Weekly could be considered a legitimate source for factual information?), I displayed Belief Perseverance, maintaining my beliefs that Tiger was a good person despite reports to the contrary (Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975). I brushed continuous reports of Tiger's affairs as mere tabloid fodder. I did not truly believe that he committed this infidelity until he himself confirmed it. Once the truth was revealed, though, he lost millions of fans, including me. I will forever be disappointed in Tiger, no matter what he does in the future. This is an example of the Trait Negativity Bias, when negative information holds more weight than positive information (Rozin & Royzman, 2001; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989). This negative occurrence will forever mar the reputation of Tiger Woods, no matter how many tournaments he wins.
Allport, Gordon: Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality; New Haven, Yale University Press, 1955.
Bruner, J. and Tagiuri, R. (1954). Person Perception. In G. Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology (Volume 2), Reading, MA: Addison Wesley
Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296-320.
Ross, L., Lepper, M., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880-892.
Skowronski, J. J., & Carlston, D. E. (1989). Negativity and extremity biases in impression formation: A review of explanations.Psychological Bulletin, 105(1), 131-142.
