Trajectories of learning about others: Liking and affiliation follow similar but distinct paths

People quickly form stable impressions of others, but impressions are just the beginning of social interaction. Surprisingly little is known about how impressions may relate to the desire to connect, or how they update over time in response to complex, changing information. In an online task, participants learned about 12 targets’ actions and the actions’ contexts from ten two-sentence vignettes, rating targets’ likeability and their desire to connect after each vignette. Actions were positive or negative, with contexts providing dispositional or situational explanations. For some targets, action valence and/or contextual explanation type changed from the first five vignettes to the last five vignettes. Participants updated impressions and affiliative desires quickly, and for some trajectories, the order of information learned mattered. Most importantly, liking and the desire to connect followed similar but different paths through these trajectories of information, establishing that impressions and affiliative desires are related but distinct constructs.