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 with others, or how they update over time in the presence of complex and changing information. In an online task, participants learned about 12 targets' actions and the contexts of those actions through a series of ten two-sentence vignettes, and rated targets on likeability and desire to connect after each vignette. Actions were positive or negative, and contexts provided dispositional or situational explanations for actions. For some targets, information type in the first five vignettes (e.g., positive dispositional) differed from the last five vignettes (e.g., negative situational). 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.