Judgments Of Others Research Articles

Stigmata: como as marcas são usadas para marcar os consumidores

Apesar da crescente busca de conhecimento acerca da importância das marcas, pouco sabemos sobre como os consumidores atribuem significados às mesmas em sua vida cotidiana. Com isso em mente, desenvolvemos este estudo visando identificar como os consumidores significam as marcas quando interagem entre si, assumindo que nas interações sociais existe uma forte influência entre os consumidores e, portanto, as impressões de uns interferem nos juízos dos outros. Para tal, uma etnografia da comunicação foi realizada por meio da observação participante da interação cotidiana de pessoas de diferentes grupos sociais. Um dos principais resultados a que chegamos foi o de que as pessoas utilizam as marcas como meio de estigmatizar o outro em interações sociais. Nossos achados alinham-se à teoria social de Erving Goffman, o que pode servir de base a uma rica interpretação desse nível de significação das marcas pelos consumidores. Nossos resultados apontam para 24 formas de estigmatização pelas marcas, distribuídas em três categorias: "comunal", "social" e "pessoal". Ao final, analisamos possíveis contribuições, tanto para a academia quanto para a gestão de marcas.

Preference, projection, and packing: Support theory models of judgments of others’ preferences

People frequently need to predict the preferences of others. Such intuitive predictions often show social projection, in which one’s own preference for an option increases its perceived popularity among others. We use support theory to model social projection in the prediction of preferences, and in particular interactions between social projection and description-dependence. Preferred options are predicted to have consistently high salience, and therefore should be less susceptible to description variations, such as unpacking, which normally affect option salience. This preference salience premise implies an interaction between social projection and option description, with reduced unpacking effects for hypotheses including preferred options, or equivalently, with reduced social projection when less-liked alternatives are unpacked. Support theory models accommodating different preference-dependent unpacking effects are tested. These models distinguish two substantial contributors to social projection effects: (a) greater evidence recruited for preferred options and (b) greater discounting of packed less-preferred options.

Projecting memories: The role of the hippocampus in emotional mentalizing

Humans have a striking tendency to use past autobiographical events to understand their own behavior. However, it is unknown if we use our own memories to understand others.To assess the role of autobiographical memory in mentalizing we examined the contribution of memory structures, specifically the hippocampus, to emotional judgment of others. Subjects were scanned while making emotional judgments regarding themselves, and protagonists deemed similar to or dissimilar from themselves. Results indicated a significant correlation between rating of the self and the similar protagonists, particularly for the events subjects recalled from their past. Furthermore, we found an interaction between similarity and recollection so that only for events subjects recalled from their past, the hippocampus reacted differently for judgments regarding the self versus dissimilar others, but not for self versus similar others. These results suggest that people actually use their own repertoire of memories and project internal self knowledge while making emotional judgments regarding others. It is speculated that mentalizing is modulated by memories of similar past events and depends on the protagonist we face.

Getting to know you: Face-to-face versus online interactions

It is an open question as to how impressions formed via computer-mediated communication (CMC) differ from those formed face-to-face (FtF). Some research suggests that judgments of others formed while interacting over CMC are more favorable than judgments formed in FtF, while other researchers argue the pattern is in the opposite direction. We sought to settle this conflict by examining impressions formed via each communication mode while controlling for the other. Participants interacted with a partner twice: once FtF and once CMC. When controlling for each communication mode, participants interacting FtF, formed more positive impressions of their partner than did those in the other sequence. Furthermore, FtF participants had greater self-other agreement then those who interacted via CMC. Implications for impressions formed over the Internet are discussed.

Psychological Distance and Priming: When Do Semantic Primes Impact Social Evaluations?

Semantic primes influence the impressions and evaluations people form of others. According to construal level theory (CLT), as stimuli get closer psychologically (e.g., physically, probabilistically), people construe stimuli in more concrete, localized, individuating terms. Across three studies, the authors present participants with individuals performing behaviors (skydiving, motor biking) that are ambiguous with respect to being either adventurous or reckless. Using a CLT framework, the authors show that people are more likely to assimilate their judgments of others to available semantic primes for psychologically close rather than distant targets (Studies 1 and 2). Conversely, they show that general, global attitudes drive evaluations more for distant rather than close targets (Study 3). Implications for priming more broadly are discussed.

Look who's talking! Facial appearance can bias source monitoring

When we see a stranger's face we quickly form impressions of his or her personality, and expectations of how the stranger might behave. Might these intuitive character judgements bias source monitoring? Participants read headlines “reported” by a trustworthy- and an untrustworthy-looking reporter. Subsequently, participants recalled which reporter provided each headline. Source memory for likely-sounding headlines was most accurate when a trustworthy-looking reporter had provided the headlines. Conversely, source memory for unlikely-sounding headlines was most accurate when an untrustworthy-looking reporter had provided the headlines. This bias appeared to be driven by the use of decision criteria during retrieval rather than differences in memory encoding. Nevertheless, the bias was apparently unrelated to variations in subjective confidence. These results show for the first time that intuitive, stereotyped judgements of others' appearance can bias memory attributions analogously to the biases that occur when people receive explicit information to distinguish sources. We suggest possible real-life consequences of these stereotype-driven source-monitoring biases.

Perception through a perspective-taking lens: Differential effects on judgment and behavior

In contrast to the view that social perception has symmetric effects on judgments and behavior, the current research explored whether perspective-taking leads stereotypes to differentially affect judgments and behavior. Across three studies, perspective-takers consistently used stereotypes more in their own behavior while simultaneously using them less in their judgments of others. After writing about an African-American, perspective-taking tendencies were positively correlated with aggressive behavior but negatively correlated with judging others as aggressive. Similarly, after writing about an elderly man, perspective-takers walked more slowly and became more conservative, but judged others as less dependent. These divergent effects of perspective-taking on judgment and behavior occurred regardless of whether perspective-taking was manipulated or measured, whether judgments were measured before or after behavior, the stereotype that was activated, and participants’ culture (American, Singaporean). These findings support theorizing that judgments and behavior can diverge when individuals’ social strategies are geared towards establishing and maintaining social bonds, as well as provide insight into how perspective-taking helps individuals manage diversity.

‘Who are we to judge?’ – On the Proportionment of Happiness to Virtue

AbstractThe claim that happiness and virtue ought to be proportionate to one another has often been expressed in the idea of a future world of divine justice, despite many moral difficulties with this idea. This paper argues that human efforts to enact such a proportionment are, ironically, justified by the same reasons that make the idea of divine justice seem so problematic. Moralists have often regarded our frailty and fallibility as reasons for abstaining from the judgment of others; and doubts about our deserving some proportionment of happiness or unhappiness often arise insofar as virtue and vice may be explained on a causal basis. This paper argues that our fallibility and our susceptibility to social influence render judgment and response indispensable, because – given these characteristics – our actions and responses decide the morality that we actually share with one another. In this situation, to ‘judge not’ is to abandon the field to those with no such scruples.

Voting behavior is reflected in amygdala response across cultures

Voting to determine one's leaders is among the most important decisions we make, yet little is known about the brain's role in how we come to these decisions. Behavioral studies have indicated that snap judgments of political candidates' faces can predict election outcomes but that the traits that lead to these judgments differ across cultures. Here we sought to investigate the neural basis for these judgments. American and Japanese natives performed simulated voting judgments of actual American and Japanese political candidates while neural activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Candidates for whom participants chose to vote elicited stronger responses in the bilateral amygdala than candidates for whom participants chose not to vote. This was true regardless of either the participant's culture or the target's culture, suggesting that these voting decisions provoked the same neural response cross-culturally. In addition, we observed a participant culture by target culture interaction in the bilateral amygdala. American and Japanese participants both showed a stronger response to cultural outgroup faces than they did to cultural in group faces, however this was unrelated to their voting decisions. These data provide insight to the mechanisms that underlie our snap judgments of others when making voting decisions and provide a neural correlate to cross-cultural consensus in social inferences.

Alkohol och äldre

M. Abrahamson: Old people's values and ideals in the public call for writing “Alcohol in my life” The aim was to investigate how old people – who during their lives have experienced the displacement of drinking's moral border from soberness to moderate drinking – are presenting themselves, and their values, and attitudes towards alcohol. Thirty-one answers to the autobiographical question list “Alcohol in my life” from informants born between 1914 and 1930 were scrutinized using a qualitative thematic analysis. The results displayed two different repertoires for writing about the shifting experiences of alcohol during the life course: the sober repertoire and the moderate repertoire. Within the sober repertoire alcohol was important and abstention was an organizing principle for life. Within the moderate repertoire, however, alcohol was presented as natural and unimportant. In common for both repertoires was the significance of alcohol in the context of social intercourse. In the sober repertoire it was crucial to show the sobriety in such a way that it should not bother people around. In the moderate repertoire it was crucial to take part in the social drinking without seemingly being affected by alcohol and at the same time stress the personal lack of need for alcohol. Even though both repertoires were filled with moral values of right and wrong they were characterized by an absence of moralistic judgements of others’ alcohol habits, with the exception of young people's drinking habits. Then values appeared which put forward young people's life in former times as good examples.

Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions: Age differences, individual differences, and the effects of counterfactual‐information salience

The present study investigated developmental trends in the effects of the salience of counterfactual alternatives on judgments of others' counterfactual-thinking-based emotions. We also examined possible correlates of individual differences in the understanding of these emotions. Thirty-four adults and 102 children, 5-8 years of age, were presented scenarios in which characters would be expected to experience regret. In one version of each scenario, the regret-relevant counterfactual alternative was made more salient than was the case with the other version. Adults consistently judged that a character for whom a counterfactual course of events would have resulted in a better outcome would feel worse than a character for whom an alternative course of events would not have resulted in a more positive outcome. The majority of the children's judgments were not affected by the counterfactual alternatives. However, the judgments of the oldest children (the 8-year-olds) were significantly more adult-like in the high-salience than in the low-salience condition. Although the three predictors examined in the present study (verbal ability, working memory capacity, second-order false belief task performance) together accounted for significant variance in performance on the emotions judgment task, no single predictor alone accounted for significant unique variance in performance. The importance of different social cognitive abilities for understanding people's affective responses is discussed.

Judgements of others’ emotional appropriateness are multidimensional

This study investigated the multidimensional structure of judgements of emotional appropriateness, the degree to which an observer judges a target's emotion to conform to observer-valued expectations for emotion in that context. Participants (N=169) were shown one of two brief video clips of an actor either showing anger or neutral expressions in an anger-evoking situation of either low, medium, or high severity. Participants rated the target's emotion on the Perception of Emotion Appropriateness Rating Scale (PEARS), which taps observers’ perceptions of a target's emotional appropriateness for a specific situation. We found that appropriateness ratings are comprised of three factors, assessment of Type Present (type of emotion in expression); Type Absent (missing key emotions); and Intensity (intensity with which the emotion is felt or expressed). Results are discussed in terms of the usefulness of a multidimensional conceptualisation of emotional appropriateness.

The neural origins of superficial and individuated judgments about ingroup and outgroup members

We often form impressions of others based on superficial information, such as a mere glimpse of their face. Given the opportunity to get to know someone, however, our judgments are allowed to become more individuated. The neural origins of these two types of social judgment remain unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to dissociate the neural mechanisms underlying superficial and individuated judgments. Given behavioral evidence demonstrating impairments in individuating others outside one's racial group, we additionally examined whether these neural mechanisms are race-selective. Superficial judgments recruited the amygdala. Individuated judgments engaged a cortical network implicated in mentalizing and theory of mind. One component of this mentalizing network showed selectivity to individuated judgments, but exclusively for targets of one's own race. The findings reveal the distinct-and race-selective-neural bases of our everyday superficial and individuated judgments of others.

Relations between Judgment of Others’ Memory and Theory of Mind in Preschoolers

Previous research has shown that talking about others in reminiscence facilitates the development of Theory of Mind(ToM)in 4-year-old Chinese preschoolers.The present study provides one potential interpretation for those findings by exploring the relations between ToM and judgment of other's memory.We assume that children who have talked more about others during recall have represented more information regarding others.They should therefore perform better when judging other's memory because they possess more knowledge about others.Processing views and situations related to others involves perspective-taking,which includes various levels of perspectives,such as perceptional(simple visual and complex visual)and cognitive(intentional and emotional)ones.In this study,different levels of perspective-taking were used to assess children's representation and judgment of others' memories,and the relations between ToM and memory judgment were examined.Forty 4-year-old children completed a verbal productive task and four ToM tasks including two Mistaken Location tasks and two Content Change tasks.They also completed a series of memory tasks in which their memory ability and judgment of others' memory were examined.In each task,participants first experienced a scenario;two days later they were required to recall the scenario and judge others' views about the scenario.The views included others' visual perception and perspectives on intention and emotion of the story characters.These views sometimes pertained to reality,but they were always not consistent with the participant's own views.Results showed that memory ability,judgment of others' memory and ToM correlated with one another,and the judgment of others' memory could still explain ToM when age,memory ability,and verbal ability were statistically controlled.Further examination showed that,in the case of others' views not pertaining to reality,performance related to judging others' memory was positively correlated with ToM scores once age,verbal abilities and memory ability had been statistically controlled.However,this correlation was absent in the case of others' views pertaining to reality.These results are discussed in relation to the ability to simultaneously process two different perspectives,which is required in both ToM tasks and memory judgment tasks.When judging others' memory,participants should be aware of others' views about a previously experienced scenario and distinguish others' perspectives from the self's perspective.Children who pass false belief tasks have to process the true belief by themselves and the false belief of others at the same time.The correlation between judging others' memory and ToM helps to account for the findings that talking about others during reminiscence facilitates the development of ToM.The nature of first-order and second-order false belief tasks is used to discuss the minor finding that children's performance on false belief tasks correlated with judgment of others' memory only in the case of others' views that do not pertain to reality.

Atividades marcárias na vida cotidiana dos consumidores: descoberta de uma nova forma de se pensar as marcas?

Apesar da crescente importância dada às marcas no marketing contemporâneo, sabemos pouco sobre como os consumidores as entendem e definem. Com isto em mente, desenvolvemos o presente estudo exploratório, com o objetivo de identificar o que os consumidores dizem sobre as marcas quando interagem entre si. Para tal assumimos que nas interações sociais as impressões de uns interferem nos juízos dos outros, tornando possível aos consumidores definirem certos aspectos das marcas e expressarem o que pensam a respeito delas. Para acessar o pensamento dos consumidores sobre as marcas, uma etnografia da comunicação foi realizada por meio da observação participante da interação cotidiana de pessoas de diferentes grupos sociais (Hymes, 1986). Tal procedimento nos levou à identificação de 38 aspectos das marcas, os quais nomeamos de atividades marcárias, com base na noção de atividades de fala, que assume que o que falamos são ações (Austin, 1990; Wittgenstein, 2005). A teoria social de Max Weber e sua tipologia da ação social nos ajudou a compreender nossos achados de pesquisa. Uma abordagem reflexiva nesta direção nos propiciou sugerir a descoberta de uma nova forma de se pensar as marcas, no que propomos um arcabouço preliminar. Por fim, discutimos contribuições do nosso estudo, tanto para a academia quanto para a gestão de marcas.

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited1

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited¹

Temporal Distance and Moral Concerns: Future Morally Questionable Behavior is Perceived as More Wrong and Evokes Stronger Prosocial Intentions

Prior research on temporal construal has shown that core values become more salient when people think about distant- as compared to near-future events. The present research shows that greater temporal distance of an event also results in greater moral concern. More specifically, it was found that people make harsher moral judgments of others' distant-future morally questionable behavior than near-future morally questionable behavior. Moreover, it was shown that people increasingly attribute distant vs. near future behavior to abstract dispositional relative to concrete situational causes, and that this attribution bias is partially responsible for the temporal distance effect on moral judgments.

Egocentric pattern projection: How implicit personality theories recapitulate the geography of the self.

Five studies demonstrated egocentric pattern projection, in that the implicit personality theories (IPTs) that participants held about other people tended to recapitulate the terrain of their own personality. To the extent that participants believed they possessed 2 traits to a similar degree within themselves, they tended, through their judgments of others and estimates of population parameters, to claim that the 2 traits were positively correlated in other people; and if they believed they possessed 2 traits to a dissimilar degree within themselves, they tended to claim that the 2 traits were negatively correlated in other people. Further evidence showed that information about the self plays a causal role in the construction of implicit theories, making a unique contribution to the shape of IPTs over and above that of information about another person. The relevance of these data for recent controversies over egocentric social judgment is discussed.

Strategies for revising judgment: How (and how well) people use others’ opinions.

A basic issue in social influence is how best to change one's judgment in response to learning the opinions of others. This article examines the strategies that people use to revise their quantitative estimates on the basis of the estimates of another person. The authors note that people tend to use 2 basic strategies when revising estimates: choosing between the 2 estimates and averaging them. The authors developed the probability, accuracy, redundancy (PAR) model to examine the relative effectiveness of these two strategies across judgment environments. A surprising result was that averaging was the more effective strategy across a wide range of commonly encountered environments. The authors observed that despite this finding, people tend to favor the choosing strategy. Most participants in these studies would have achieved greater accuracy had they always averaged. The identification of intuitive strategies, along with a formal analysis of when they are accurate, provides a basis for examining how effectively people use the judgments of others. Although a portfolio of strategies that includes averaging and choosing can be highly effective, the authors argue that people are not generally well adapted to the environment in terms of strategy selection.

The specificity of referential thinking: A comparison of schizotypy and social anxiety

Ideas of reference are considered hallmarks of schizophrenia-related psychopathology. However, the specificity of referential thinking to schizophrenia-related psychopathology has not been examined empirically. Schizotypy reflects the latent liability for schizophrenia and is associated with referential thinking. Referential thinking may occur in other forms of psychopatholoy, such as social anxiety, which is characterized by cognitive distortions in which the thoughts and judgments of others are viewed as having reference to the self. Our primary aim was to examine the specificity of referential thinking to schizotypy. A sample of 830 college students completed a psychometric screening, of which 102 met criteria for inclusion in one of three groups: schizotypy ( n = 30), social anxiety ( n = 28), normal controls ( n = 44). Participants completed the Referential Thinking Scale (REF), and other measures of schizotypy (Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire, Peters et al Delusion Index, Schizophrenia Proneness Scale, Social Anhedonia Scale), affect, and intellectual functioning. The schizotypy group exhibited higher REF scores than both comparison groups. REF scores were associated with other schizotypy measures and loaded onto a positive schizotypy factor, but not onto a negative schizotypy or negative affect factor. These findings support the specificity of high levels of referential thinking to schizotypy and the construct validity of the REF.