People assume others have unified, coherent personalities and seek consistency in them.

Evidence

The focus of Hamilton and Sherman’s (1996) article was not on entitativity per se. Its primary purpose was to pursue an extended comparison of how perceivers process information about individual persons and groups. Drawing on the extensive impression formation literature, they argued that processing information about individuals is governed by a series of principles. These principles all derive from a basic premise that perceivers assume unity in the personalities of others, that persons are coherent entities. Based on that premise, other principles followed: that perceivers expect consistency in a person’s personality (as manifested in their traits, attitudes, and behaviors), draw inferences about the dispositional properties that characterize the person’s personality, develop an organized impression of the person, and seek to resolve inconsistencies in the information they learn about a person. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to impression formation literature and inference processes; connects to general social cognition work on person perception. — connects to: Each empirical tendency expresses the whole person, not merely a part — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1326