Social Psychology. Daniel W. Barrett

5 Social Perception

      Speed interviewing is used by a wide range of companies. Here, an applicant for job in petroleum engineering strives to leave a favorable impression.

      AP Photo/Tim Johnson.

      Learning Objectives

       5.1 Explain the additive and configural models of impression formation and illustrate each with an example.

       5.2 Describe what is meant by a “thin slice” and the research that has supported its predictive value; describe implicit personality theories; explain how expectations or prophecies can be self-fulfilling.

       5.3 Name and define Ekman’s five categories of nonverbal behavior; identify the six universal facial expressions; explain blended emotions and display rules.

       5.4 Identify and explain the major challenges of cross-cultural research.

       5.5 Summarize the research on conscious and nonconscious deception detection and on the four cognitive illusions.

       5.6 Define attribution and explain the fundamental attribution error, correspondence bias, actor/observer effect, and Kelley’s covariation matrix.

      “NICE TO MEET YOU. YOU’RE HIRED!” JOB INTERVIEWS IN SECONDS

      You have probably heard of speed dating, where singles gather in a large room and rapidly move from table to table, person to person, quickly evaluating others who are also searching for a romantic partner. Many employers have applied this notion to the hiring process to increase administrative efficiency. The basic setup is similar: a large job fair with multiple employers seated at various tables and job applicants—often including college students—who bounce from table to table in hopes of making a splash in their brief time before the interviewer. Interactions typically last between five and fifteen minutes, forcing interviewers to rapidly “size up” job candidates. Speed interviewing is becoming increasingly popular among U.S. corporations (Needleman, 2007; Ramsey, 2006) and has been utilized by companies ranging from IBM, Texas Instruments, Abbott Labs, to Travelodge. But can employers make good decisions based on a such brief exposure to candidates? Quite possibly. Research on “thin slices” suggests that humans are capable of making remarkably accurate impressions of strangers within a few minutes and sometimes less.

      Psychologist John Gottman has demonstrated a similar phenomenon with respect to marital longevity (Gottman & Levenson, 1999). Gottman’s research team examined videotapes of fifteen-minute discussions of marital conflict between one hundred twenty-four newlywed couples. His researchers coded each second of the interview with an emotion word based on facial expressions and then used these ratings to form an overall impression of the relationship. Gottman found that his interviewers were able to accurately predict whether or not the couple was still married six years later based on just the first three minutes of the marital interaction! This is the same basic logic behind speed interviewing: Ask a few targeted questions, monitor nonverbal behavior (e.g., eye contact) and verbal responses, and decide who to immediately reject and who to invite back for an extended interview. As we’ll see in this chapter, forming impressions of others can occur in a remarkably brief period of time, often quite accurately. Sometimes, though, rapid first impressions rely too heavily on shortcuts, leading to imperfect assessments. Here again we see the trade-off between rapid, efficient processing (the X-system) and more deliberate, resource-intensive processing (the C-system) discussed previously; the trade-off is the hinge pin for claiming that we have free will. We’ll describe the key components of social perception, discussing evolutionary, contextual, and individual-level influences on this very important dimension of human social behavior. In addition, social perception is a key element in our sociality because our construals of the actions and motives of others affects not only how we treat them but also how they treat us.

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      Think Ahead!

      1 How do people form impressions of others?

      2 To what extent are facial expressions of emotion similar across cultures?

      3 How good are people at using nonverbal cues to detect lies?

      4 How do we try to explain the behavior of others?

      Impression Formation

      Early Research

      One of the early pioneers of research on social perception was Solomon Asch, who sought to determine how people form initial impressions of others. Asch (1946) suggested two possible processes by which first impressions are created. The first is an additive process, in which, upon encountering a person for the first time, the perceiver observes particular personality traits and combines them to produce an overall impression of the target. For instance, during your initial encounter with a person—we’ll call her Maria—you may notice that she is intelligent. You may also realize that Maria is funny, unfriendly, and belligerent. According to the additive model, your impression of Maria would essentially be a sum of each of these traits (as well as any others) that you think she possesses (impression = intelligent + funny + unfriendly + belligerent). This is an algebraic model because the individual traits are added together to form the whole (see Figure 5.1). The alternative hypothesis postulates that the perceivers form an overall impression (the “sum”) first and only later individualize that impression by isolating specific composite traits. This is the configural model, which means that we perceive the person as a psychological unity or configuration of characteristics and that this unity affects how we construe individual elements (see Figure 5.1).

      Asch (1946) tested these two models in a series of twelve studies in which participants were exposed to varying sets of personal adjectives and subsequently asked to form overall impressions of the targets described by those adjectives. In the primary experiment, participants heard one of the two following lists, which differed only in their fourth term: (a) intelligent-skillful-industrious-warm-determined-practical-cautious, (b) intelligent-skillful-industrious-cold-determined-practical-cautious. Asch (1946) found that the overall person descriptions differed remarkably between the two groups. Simply substituting one word—cold for warm—significantly changed the general impression. For instance, a “warm” target person was likely to be seen as generous and wise, whereas a “cold” person was instead described as ungenerous and shrewd. Remember, only one adjective differed between the groups. Asch ran several variants on this study in which he examined how other combinations of adjectives affected overall impressions. In one version he substituted polite-blunt for warm-cold, and found much weaker effects on the overall impression than for warm-cold. From this and his remaining studies Asch derived two primary conclusions. First, impression formation seemed more in line with the configural, as opposed to algebraic, model. Second, certain traits—including warm-cold, appear to be more influential in the impression formation process. Variations in these central traits affected the overall impressions more than did variations in such peripheral traits, such as polite-blunt (Asch, 1946).

      Several years later Harold Kelley (1950) conducted an interesting follow-up study in which he provided student participants with a written description of a guest lecturer in their economics class. The lecturer, previously unknown to the participants, was introduced as a “rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined” to about half of the participants and as a “very warm person, industrious, critical,