Findings In Social Psychology Research Articles

Does Interpretation in Psychology Differ From Interpretation in Natural Science?

Following an initial discussion of the general nature of interpretation in contemporary psychology, and social and natural science, relevant views of Charles Taylor and Thomas Kuhn are considered in some detail. Although both Taylor and Kuhn agree that interpretation in the social or human sciences differs in some ways from interpretation in the natural sciences, they disagree about the nature and origins of such difference. Our own analysis follows, in which we consider differences in interpretation between the natural and social sciences (psychology in particular) in terms of Ian Hacking's use of Elizabeth Anscombe's conceptualization of actions as intentional acts under particular descriptions. We conclude that both Taylor and Kuhn are correct to point to differences in interpretation between the natural and social sciences. We also argue that in psychology, such interpretive differences, contra Kuhn and pro Taylor, are qualitative rather than quantitative. They arise from the nature of persons as self‐interpretive, reactive beings who act under socioculturally sanctioned, linguistic descriptions. The actions of psychological persons may display qualitative differences over time and across contexts as these descriptions, including social scientific and psychological findings and interpretations, change. In contrast, even when descriptions in natural science change, such changes do not spawn changes in the self‐interpretations and intentional actions of the focal phenomena of natural science. We also make the point that much current confusion surrounding interpretation in science arises from the unwarranted tendency of some commentators to treat interpretation as subjective, in ways that ignore the objective grounding of interpretation within regulated social practices, including scientific practices sanctioned by scientific communities.

Automatic nonverbal analysis of social interaction in small groups: A review

An increasing awareness of the scientific and technological value of the automatic understanding of face-to-face social interaction has motivated in the past few years a surge of interest in the devising of computational techniques for conversational analysis. As an alternative to existing linguistic approaches for the automatic analysis of conversations, a relatively recent domain is using findings in social cognition, social psychology, and communication that have established the key role that nonverbal communication plays in the formation, maintenance, and evolution of a number of fundamental social constructs, which emerge from face-to-face interactions in time scales that range from short glimpses all the way to long-term encounters. Small group conversations are a specific case on which much of this work has been conducted. This paper reviews the existing literature on automatic analysis of small group conversations using nonverbal communication, and aims at bridging the current fragmentation of the work in this domain, currently split among half a dozen technical communities. The review is organized around the main themes studied in the literature and discusses, in a comparative fashion, about 100 works addressing problems related to the computational modeling of interaction management, internal states, personality traits, and social relationships in small group conversations, along with pointers to the relevant literature in social science. Some of the many open challenges and opportunities in this domain are also discussed.

Neural computation as a tool to differentiate perceptual from emotional processes: The case of anger superiority effect

Research findings in social and cognitive psychology imply that it is easier to detect angry faces than happy faces in a crowd of neutral faces [Hansen, C. H., & Hansen, R. D. (1988). Finding the face in the crowd – An anger superiority effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 917–924]. This phenomenon has been held to have evolved over phylogenetic development because it was adaptive to quickly and accurately detect a potential threat in the environment. However, across recent studies, a controversy has emerged about the underlying perceptual versus emotional factors responsible for this so-called anger superiority effect [Juth, P., Lundqvist, D., Karlsson, A., & Ohman, A. (2005). Looking for foes and friends: Perceptual and emotional factors when finding a face in the crowd. Emotion, 5(4), 379–395; Purcell, D. G., Stewart, A. L., & Skov, R. B. (1996). It takes a confounded face to pop out of a crowd. Perception, 25(9), 1091–1108]. To tease apart emotional and perceptual processes, we used neural network analyzes of human faces in two different simulations. Results show that a perceptual bias is probably acting against faster and more accurate identification of anger faces compared to happy faces at a purely perceptual level. We suggest that a parsimonious hypothesis related to the simple perceptual properties of the stimuli might explain these behavioral results without reference to evolutionary processes. We discuss the importance of statistical or connectionist analysis for empirical studies that seek to isolate perceptual from emotional factors, but also learned vs. innate factors in the processing of facial expression of emotion.

How cultural evolutionary theory can inform social psychology and vice versa.

Cultural evolutionary theory is an interdisciplinary field in which human culture is viewed as a Darwinian process of variation, competition, and inheritance, and the tools, methods, and theories developed by evolutionary biologists to study genetic evolution are adapted to study cultural change. It is argued here that an integration of the theories and findings of mainstream social psychology and of cultural evolutionary theory can be mutually beneficial. Social psychology provides cultural evolution with a set of empirically verified microevolutionary cultural processes, such as conformity, model-based biases, and content biases, that are responsible for specific patterns of cultural change. Cultural evolutionary theory provides social psychology with ultimate explanations for, and an understanding of the population-level consequences of, many social psychological phenomena, such as social learning, conformity, social comparison, and intergroup processes, as well as linking social psychology with other social science disciplines such as cultural anthropology, archaeology, and sociology.

Social signal processing: Survey of an emerging domain

The ability to understand and manage social signals of a person we are communicating with is the core of social intelligence. Social intelligence is a facet of human intelligence that has been argued to be indispensable and perhaps the most important for success in life. This paper argues that next-generation computing needs to include the essence of social intelligence – the ability to recognize human social signals and social behaviours like turn taking, politeness, and disagreement – in order to become more effective and more efficient. Although each one of us understands the importance of social signals in everyday life situations, and in spite of recent advances in machine analysis of relevant behavioural cues like blinks, smiles, crossed arms, laughter, and similar, design and development of automated systems for social signal processing (SSP) are rather difficult. This paper surveys the past efforts in solving these problems by a computer, it summarizes the relevant findings in social psychology, and it proposes a set of recommendations for enabling the development of the next generation of socially aware computing.

Inside intuition Eugene Sadler‐Smith

Inside Intuition sets out to apply recent findings in social and cognitive psychology, neurosciences and neurobiology to the phenomenon of intuition. Rather than a mystical phenomenon, SadlerSmith argues that discoveries in empirical science have made intuition explicable and manageable. As a consequence, it can now be harnessed for application in professional contexts. Although the book is intended for a business management audience, there are evident extensions to medicine and the health professions. As with any book review, the central task is to convey to the reader whether the book is worth purchasing and reading. I must, at the outset, declare my biases. To be honest my initial response to the book was highly negative. Coming from a background in logic and philosophy I have always been suspicious of ‘psychologism’ when it comes to accounts of inference and reasoning. I found the breezy style somewhat off putting. The book is clearly the work of someone who has enthusiastically embraced the neuroscience revolution and has no philosophical qualms about neurophysiological reduction. One is hard-pressed to find critical accounts of the science put forward, doubts cast on the reliability of the gut feeling, and in every case creative (almost always synonymous with intuition) approaches triumph over the plodding and methodical application of reason. With a little hard work we can all be Mozarts and Einsteins. However, I must admit to being somewhat won over in the end. The book is readable, particularly in small aliquots. It contains innumerable engaging and diverting diagrams and flow charts, photographs of famous intuitives (though the eyes of Igor Stravinsky and Sir Michael Tippett in the photographs on pages 16–17 have a certain otherworldly glow) and enough quotations from the world’s literature on intuition to populate a decades worth of powerpoint presentations. Its readability is assisted by its format. It is organized around 12 chapters. The book is not really a sustained scholarly argument, but resembles a tour guide of recent cognitive science. Each chapter has an introductory text box with the main idea of the chapter and a concluding text box with the takeaway messages organized under the headings of key ideas, an intuition quote, and an action point. Medical readers familiar with the translational literature will appreciate these bottom line summaries, which means that they could likely read all the main idea and take away sections of the book, check out a few nifty flow charts, look at a few famous people with intuition in about 10 minutes and save the price of the book. So will the book be of interest to clinicians? No doubt to some, and particularly to those who resist algorithmic accounts of medical reasoning. Medical examples abound in the book, though they are not particularly deep or insightful. For example, we are told: ‘The clinical judgement exercised by healthcare professionals is another example of an area of practice in which it is difficult to account for effective performance in purely technical and rational terms.’ True, no question. But does invoking intuition bring us closer to the sort of account we desire of clinical judgement? Does it make it capable of being expressed explicitly, and more importantly taught? Later in the book, he favourably cites Trish Greenhalgh’s praise of intuition in the diagnosis of disease. Most clinicians accept the idea of diagnostic hunches, but this type of hunch only makes sense if you have experience as a clinician. We would be very sceptical indeed (or at least I hope we would) of claims of non-clinicians to have accurate diagnostic hunches (though these days with google doctors in great abundance, I should perhaps not be overly confidant.) My final concern is that this book packs far too many diverse and heterogeneous human capabilities under the rubric of intuition. In the concluding section Sadler-Smith writes: Many CEO’s in major companies claim to have made multimillion dollar decisions based on their gut instincts. Nor is this behaviour confined to senior executives in multi-national companies who have the power to wield intuition: composers, artists and scientists, teachers and doctors, firefighters, neonatal nurses, HR managers, chief financial officers, students, biomedical and aerospace scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors across organizations testify to the role intuition plays in creative, entrepreneurial, professional social and moral judgements. No doubt, so do hackers, spammers, fraudsters and mobsters. Such cognitive riches cannot only be for the good, but one would be hard pressed to believe such after reading this book. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice ISSN 1356-1294

The Actor–Observer Bias and Moral Intuitions: Adding Fuel to Sinnott-Armstrong’s Fire

In a series of recent papers, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has used findings in social psychology to put pressure on the claim that our moral beliefs can be non-inferentially justified. More specifically, he has suggested that insofar as our moral intuitions are subject to what psychologists call framing effects, this poses a real problem for moral intuitionism. In this paper, we are going to try to add more fuel to the empirical fire that Sinnott-Armstrong has placed under the feet of the intuitionist. Along the way, we first provide an overview of what Sinnott-Armstrong calls the Master Argument against intuitionism. Then we examine some of the literature on framing effects—especially as it pertains to moral philosophy. Finally, we present the results of a new study which create yet another hurdle intuitionists must clear if they want to motivate their view. It appears that in addition to being influenced by framing effects, our moral intuitions are also influenced by an actor–observer bias as well—a bias whereby we hold other people to different moral standards than we would hold ourselves even if we were in the same situation. If we’re right, the burden is on the moral intuitionist to explain why we should have faith in our moral intuitions despite the gathering evidence concerning their seeming unreliability. And by our lights, this is something that simply cannot be done from the armchair.

Ideology and Intuition in Moral Education

We propose that social psychological findings on the intuitive bases of moral judgment have broad implications for moral education. The “five foundations theory of intuitive ethics” is applied to explain a longstanding rift in moral education as an ideological disagreement about which moral intuitions should be endorsed and cultivated. The Kohlbergian moral reasoning side has sought to limit the domain of moral education to Harm and Fairness-related moral concerns, whereas character education approaches have tried also to cultivate intuitions concerning the Ingroup, Authority and Purity foundations. Recent attempts to merge the two lines of moral education have not fully addressed this ideological rift, for example by delineating how a single approach could reconcile opposing groupand individual-focused conceptions of moral education. We conclude that psychological research on moral intuition offers a descriptive account of human morality that reveals problems with attempts to create a normative basis for moral education from either side of the ideological divide.

Situating Social Influence Processes: Dynamic, Multidirectional Flows of Influence Within Social Networks

Social psychologists have studied the psychological processes involved in persuasion, conformity, and other forms of social influence, but they have rarely modeled the ways influence processes play out when multiple sources and multiple targets of influence interact over time. However, workers in other fields from sociology and economics to cognitive science and physics have recognized the importance of social influence and have developed models of influence flow in populations and groups—generally without relying on detailed social psychological findings. This article reviews models of social influence from a number of fields, categorizing them using four conceptual dimensions to delineate the universe of possible models. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations to build models that incorporate the detailed, microlevel understanding of influence processes derived from focused laboratory studies but contextualized in ways that recognize how multidirectional, dynamic influences are situated in people's social networks and relationships.

The Political Economy of Religion and Social Insurance in the United States, 1910–1939

There are few scholars who would disagree with the proposition that individual economic position and economic risk play a critical role in shaping preferences for income redistribution and social insurance. There is less consensus, however, about the extent to which non-economic factors also influence individual preferences regarding social insurance provision. A number of scholars have examined how issues of race and identity have influenced the development of social insurance programs in the United States, as well as individual attitudes with respect to these programs. In a theoretical context, other authors have considered how attitudes toward income redistribution might also depend upon psychological dispositions such as the “belief in a just world.” In this article, we focus on religiosity as an important factor that can shape both individual preferences and policy outcomes regarding social insurance in the United States. To do so, we develop an argument about religion and social insurance as substitutes that draws both on existing work on the political economy of social insurance and on findings in social psychology regarding what we call the “coping effect” of religion. We test our hypothesis using historical evidence from two early social insurance policies: workers’ compensation legislation enacted by state governments between 1910 and 1930 and New Deal unemployment relief.

Up Close and Personal: Investor Sophistication and the Disposition Effect

This paper analyzes the trading records of a major discount brokerage house to investigate the disposition effect, the tendency to sell stocks that have appreciated in price (winners) sooner than stocks that trade below the purchase price (losers). In contrast to previous research that has demonstrated the disposition effect by aggregating across investors, our main objective is to identify differences in the disposition bias across individuals and explain this in terms of underlying investor characteristics. Building on the findings in experimental economics and social psychology, we hypothesize that differences in investor literacy about financial markets and trading frequency are responsible in part for the variation in individual disposition effect. Using demographic and socioeconomic variables as proxies for investor literacy, we find empirical evidence that wealthier individuals and individuals employed in professional occupations exhibit a lower disposition effect. Consistent with experimental economics, trading frequency also tends to reduce the disposition effect. We provide guidelines for investment advisors, regulators, and investment communities to utilize our findings and help investors make better decisions.

Exporting Social Psychology: Effects of Attractiveness on Perceptions of Entrepreneurs, Their Ideas for New Products, and Their Financial Success1

Entrepreneurship researchers have recently drawn heavily on the theories and findings of social psychology. The present research sought to add to this growing literature by investigating effects of entrepreneurs' attractiveness. In Study 1, participants read descriptions of ideas for new products accompanied by photos of the entrepreneurs who ostensibly invented them; the entrepreneurs were either attractive or unattractive. Both entrepreneurs and their ideas for new products were rated more favorably when the entrepreneurs were attractive than unattractive. In Study 2, entrepreneurs were shown (on videotape) making actual presentations of their ideas to potential investors. Results indicated that the more attractive the entrepreneurs, were, the more favorably both they and their ideas were rated by persons who watched the tapes. In Study 3, entrepreneurs' attractiveness was found to be positively related to their actual financial success.

TARGET ARTICLE: The Nonobvious Social Psychology of Happiness

There are several classic findings in social psychol ogy that behavioral scientists recognize as having ex erted a profound influence on people's understanding of the world. The stars of our field, such as Milgram, Zimbardo, Darley, and Latane, have demonstrated the power of social situations to influence behavior, for ex ample in obedience, bystander intervention, confor mity, and altruism. Another classic set of findings of social psychology describes in-group biases, and how group membership profoundly influences people's perceptions of events. The They Saw a Game study by Hastorf and Cantril (1954)-which showed how Dartmouth and Princeton fans recalled two very differ ent football games, although they viewed the same game-is a wonderful example in this area. John Bargh and others have begun a research tradition on

SENSITIZING SOCIAL AGENTS FOR VIRTUAL TRAINING

ABSTRACT Virtual training allows the learning and rehearsal of implicit cues, e.g., trustworthy leading action in an emergency evacuation, that cannot be easily understood through merely reading about situations, while mitigating the danger and expense of live rehearsals. We have focused our efforts on designing social agents that can engage in and help to train humans to generate the trustworthy behaviors that help to ensure a successful evacuation. Drawing upon social science research and using a “role-reversal method,” we successfully constructed agents that can perceive trustworthiness as humans do. The agents first collect human responses to their own nonverbal cues in controlled experimental training scenarios. Using these results, we obtain optimal parameters for nonverbal cues of trustworthiness, and then can use them to guide agents who evaluate human performance in the same training scenarios. The method enables us to convert social psychological findings into computational mechanisms.

Emergence of self and other in perception and action: An event-control approach

The present paper analyzes the regularities referred to via the concept ‘self.’ This is important, for cognitive science traditionally models the self as a cognitive mediator between perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs. This leads to the assertion that the self causes action. Recent findings in social psychology indicate this is not the case and, as a consequence, certain cognitive scientists model the self as being epiphenomenal. In contrast, the present paper proposes an alternative approach (i.e., the event-control approach) that is based on recently discovered regularities between perception and action. Specifically, these regularities indicate that perception and action planning utilize common neural resources. This leads to a coupling of perception, planning, and action in which the first two constitute aspects of a single system (i.e., the distal-event system) that is able to pre-specify and detect distal events. This distal-event system is then coupled with action (i.e., effector-control systems) in a constraining, as opposed to ‘causal’ manner. This model has implications for how we conceptualize the manner in which one infers the intentions of another, anticipates the intentions of another, and possibly even experiences another. In conclusion, it is argued that it may be possible to map the concept ‘self’ onto the regularities referred to in the event-control model, not in order to reify ‘the self’ as a causal mechanism, but to demonstrate its status as a useful concept that refers to regularities that are part of the natural order.

The relationship of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) to social psychology

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) includes several main theories and practices, especially the hypotheses that people are both constructivists and destructivists. It holds that they have powerful innate and socially acquired tendencies to often be self-helping and “rational” but also self-defeating and “irrational.” REBT largely derives its method of therapy from many clients seen by the author, from hundreds of therapy studies, and from the social psychology literature. This article shows how REBT formulations overlap with some of the findings of social psychology, how these findings can appreciably be used to improve REBT practice, how some of the unique theories and methods of REBT may contribute to the field of social psychology, and how social psychologists can help to research some of the main REBT principles.

Marital investments, time consistency and emotions

A benchmark model of a married couple’s educational investment yields an inefficient outcome due to the possibility of opportunistic divorce. Motivated by findings in social psychology, I use psychological game theory to incorporate belief-dependent guilt feelings. Multiple equilibria become possible. Some marriages have inefficient under-investment. Some have efficient outcomes and preclude divorce. If guilt is sufficiently important, a life-long efficient marriage is implied because a spouse may signal a trust so strong as to force the partner to hold beliefs that make divorce unattractive.

Culture Clash? Apologies East and West

Following the 1 April 2001 plane collision over the South China Seas, China and the United States engaged in two weeks of intensive 'apology diplomacy'. What role did culture play in these events? Drawing on experimental findings in social and cross-cultural psychology, we argue against the pundits that essentialized cultural difference--and against those who denied that culture matters. Instead, we maintain that both cultural differences and cultural commonalties played a significant role in Sino-American apology diplomacy.

Combating Stigma in the Printed News: Contributions of Direct Quotations and Journalistic Story Type to Reader Perceptions of a Controversial Gay Man

This study investigates how presenting the same factual content with varying narrators, as required by harder-versus softer-news formats, influences the way readers perceive the gay male subject of an actual news story. Because previous social-psychological findings have suggested that people typically respond to others first as members of distinct groups and then later as individuals if and only if they have sufficient motivation for doing so, the expectation was that presenting the same factual content with varying narrators—effected through the quantity of direct quotations included from the news subject—would provide such motivation. The findings of this study support this contention.

“That’s Completely Obvious... and Important”: Lay Judgments of Social Psychological Findings

Many social psychologists believe that if research results are obvious, they are unimportant and uninteresting. The current study evaluated lay perceptions of social psychological research findings. Results from three studies reveal differences between lay evaluations of research and scientific evaluations. In Study 1, students with no prior exposure to social psychology judge the most obvious research findings to be the most important. In Study 2, students can predict findings, and the most predictable findings are judged most important. In Study 3, students judge the most obvious findings to be most important to establish with research. Results address the accuracy of lay judgments of research, judgmental strategies, and the process by which social psychologists select research topics.