Person Perception Processes Research Articles

The Person-Perception Process and its Influence on Social Interpersonal Dynamics in Global Teams

The Person-Perception Process and its Influence on Social Interpersonal Dynamics in Global Teams

The mind's “aye”? Investigating overlap in findings produced by reverse correlation versus self-report

Reverse correlation is an influential method for assessing mental representations. One benefit of reverse correlation is that the method may capture psychological content that individuals are unwilling to self-report due to social desirability concerns, particularly in domains like person perception or intergroup processes. To investigate the degree to which reverse correlation and self-report findings are aligned, 32 prior reverse correlation studies (totaling 148 analyses) were converted into comparable measures of self-report (total N = 3441). Despite only 13% of original studies containing a parallel self-report measure, 55% of research conclusions could be replicated using self-report, though effect sizes from the two methods were unrelated (r = −0.06). The two methods were more likely to reach the same conclusion for findings that were rated as more intuitive. Future uses of reverse correlation will benefit from greater consideration to when the method is most necessary and informative.

Applying Signaling Theory to Examine Credibility and Impression Management on Social Media

This study adapts and extends signaling theory to examine perceptions of credibility, gender, homophily, and impression management on social media. Specifically, the influence of different signal types – conventional, assessment, and strategic signals. A 2x3 experimental design was conducted to examine the effect of source gender and signal type on receiver perceptions of source and message credibility, homophily, and impressions of the source. Findings confirm that different signal types affect the perception of message and source credibility on social media. Concepts of gender and homophily were not impacted by signal types in this research. With the increase of image-oriented social media such as Instagram, these results demonstrate the sender's role in the person perception process. The role of signaling theory for strategic communication practices is addressed, and future theoretical directions are considered.

Attributions of emotion and reduced attitude openness prevent people from engaging others with opposing views

People exhibit a general unwillingness to engage others on social issues for which they disagree (e.g., political elections, police funding, vaccine mandates, etc.), a phenomenon that contributes to the political polarization vexing societies today. Previous research has largely attributed this unwillingness to the perception that such counterattitudinal targets are extreme, certain, and/or difficult to change on these topics. However, the present research offers an additional theoretical explanation. First, we introduce a less studied perception of targets, their affective-cognitive attitude basis (i.e., the degree to which an attitude is seemingly based on emotions versus reasons) that is critical in determining engagement willingness. Specifically, perceivers are less willing to engage with targets who are perceived to hold an affective (vs. cognitive) attitude basis on a topic, because these targets are inferred to have low attitudinal openness on it (i.e., expected to be unlikely to genuinely “hear out” the perceiver). Second, we use a series of multimethod studies with varied U.S. samples to show why this person perception process is central to understanding counterattitudinal engagement. Compared to proattitudinal targets, perceivers on both sides of an issue ascribe more affective (vs. cognitive) attitude bases to rival (counterattitudinal) targets, which cues inferences of reduced attitudinal openness, thereby diminishing people's willingness to engage with these individuals.

Person Perception, Meet People Perception: Exploring the Social Vision of Groups

Groups, teams, and collectives—people—are incredibly important to human behavior. People live in families, work in teams, and celebrate and mourn together in groups. Despite the huge variety of human group activity and its fundamental importance to human life, social-psychological research on person perception has overwhelmingly focused on its namesake, the person, rather than expanding to consider people perception. By looking to two unexpected partners, the vision sciences and organization behavior, we find emerging work that presents a path forward, building a foundation for understanding how people perceive other people. And yet this nascent field is missing critical insights that scholars of social vision might offer: specifically, for example, the chance to connect perception to behavior through the mediators of cognition and motivational processes. Here, we review emerging work across the vision and social sciences to extract core principles of people perception: efficiency, capacity, and complexity. We then consider complexity in more detail, focusing on how people perception modifies person-perception processes and enables the perception of group emergent properties as well as group dynamics. Finally, we use these principles to discuss findings and outline areas fruitful for future work. We hope that fellow scholars take up this people-perception call.

Identifying Racial Minorities' Nationality: Non-verbal Accent as a Cue to Cultural Group Membership.

Historically, racial appearance has been a common source of information upon which we categorize others, as have verbal accents. Enculturated non-verbal accents which are detected in facial expressions of emotion, hairstyle, and everyday behaviors, have also been found to exist. We investigated the effects of non-verbal accent on categorization and stereotyping when people are exposed to thin slices of behavior. The effects of racial essentialism, which inclines people to categorize and assess others by race, were also tested. In three studies, Australian participants were shown short, muted videos of target individuals performing everyday behaviors. The targets were of a minority (Asian) racial appearance, but half had been interracially adopted as babies and grew up in the Australian mainstream. The other half were foreign nationals who grew up in Asia. In Studies 1 and 2, Australian participants rated each target as Australian or foreign. In both studies, they correctly identified the targets at above chance levels. In Study 3, participants rated the targets on Australian and Asian stereotype traits. They were not told that some targets were Australian and some were foreign, but they nonetheless rated the congruent stereotypes more strongly. Lay theory of race moderated the effect of non-verbal accent, with a weaker effect among participants who endorsed racial essentialism. These preliminary findings reveal subtle effects of non-verbal accent as a cue to cultural group membership and invite further work into the effects of non-verbal accent on person perception and categorization processes.

What’s in an Adjective?

Abstract. In this exploratory study, a group of subjects was asked to come up with visible and quantifiable behaviors tied to certain person-descriptive adjectives. Another group of subjects then rated how much different levels of the behaviors would justify the use of each adjective to describe a person, as a cross-validation. The reliability of these ratings was excellent. Associations between adjectives and “their” behaviors were very strong and largely specific. The shapes of associations were usually linear or negatively accelerated, which is highly relevant for the formal modeling of person perception processes. Researchers aiming to measure personality in terms of behavior should make more systematic use of the knowledge that competent users of the natural language already share in this regard.

Self- and Other-Dehumanization Processes in Health-Related Contexts: A Critical Review of the Literature

Dehumanization is an everyday, pervasive phenomenon in health contexts. Given its detrimental consequences to health care, much research has been dedicated to understanding and promoting the humanization of health services. However, health care service research has neglected the sociopsychological processes involved in the dehumanization of self and others, in formal but also informal health-related contexts. Drawing upon sociopsychological models of dehumanization, this article will bridge this gap by presenting a critical review of studies on everyday meaning-making and person perception processes of dehumanization in health-related contexts. A database search was conducted in PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, using a combination of keywords on dehumanization and health/illness/body; 3,229 references were screened; 95 full texts were assessed for eligibility; 59 studies were included. Most studies focused on informal contexts, reflecting a decontextualized and one-sided view of dehumanization (i.e., not integrating actors’ and victims’ perspectives). Despite the dominant focus on self-dehumanization, emerging perspectives uncover the role of processes that deny human uniqueness to others, and their individual determinants and consequences for mental health. A few studies bring to light the functions of a variety of dehumanizing body metaphors on self- and other-dehumanization. These trends in the literature leave several gaps, which are here critically analyzed to inform future research.

Exploring the Attachment Styles of Adolescents Who Sexually Offend: A Mixed-Methods Research Approach

The literature suggests that between 20% and 33% of all sexual offences are committed by young people [1]. Children and adolescents who display sexually harmful behaviour are not a homogenous group in their offending patterns or their psychosocial needs. This study used a mixed-methods approach to explore the attachment styles of adolescent sex offenders, using a typology based on victimage. The Adolescent Attachment Style Interview (ASI-AD; [2]) was administered to 32 young males between the ages of 12 and 19 who were convicted or alleged to have committed a sexual offence. Results suggested that adolescent sex offenders are likely to display insecure attachment styles. The results further suggested that peer abusers are more likely to display avoidant attachment styles whereas child abusers are more likely to display anxious attachment styles. The results of this study were in line with adult models of sexual offending [3]. The qualitative results further suggested that adolescent sex offenders value predictability, validation, feeling an emotional bond and getting tangible support from their relationships with close others. The adolescents in this study also identified negative past experiences, person-perception processes, and negative affectivity as factors that present as relational barriers. Findings of this study suggest that the exploration of attachment relationships can be useful in discriminating the particular needs and interpersonal dynamics of child abusers and peer abusers. This has clear implications for clinical practice and policy, as it allows for the development of individualised and person-centred treatment plans.

The ironic impact of activists: Negative stereotypes reduce social change influence

AbstractDespite recognizing the need for social change in areas such as social equality and environmental protection, individuals often avoid supporting such change. Researchers have previously attempted to understand this resistance to social change by examining individuals' perceptions of social issues and social change. We instead examined the possibility that individuals resist social change because they have negative stereotypes of activists, the agents of social change. Participants had negative stereotypes of activists (feminists and environmentalists), regardless of the domain of activism, viewing them as eccentric and militant. Furthermore, these stereotypes reduced participants' willingness to affiliate with ‘typical’ activists and, ultimately, to adopt the behaviours that these activists promoted. These results indicate that stereotypes and person perception processes more generally play a key role in creating resistance to social change. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The social-sensory interface: category interactions in person perception.

Research is increasingly challenging the claim that distinct sources of social information—such as sex, race, and emotion—are processed in discrete fashion. Instead, there appear to be functionally relevant interactions that occur. In the present article, we describe research examining how cues conveyed by the human face, voice, and body interact to form the unified representations that guide our perceptions of and responses to other people. We explain how these information sources are often thrown into interaction through bottom-up forces (e.g., phenotypic cues) as well as top-down forces (e.g., stereotypes and prior knowledge). Such interactions point to a person perception process that is driven by an intimate interface between bottom-up perceptual and top-down social processes. Incorporating data from neuroimaging, event-related potentials (ERP), computational modeling, computer mouse-tracking, and other behavioral measures, we discuss the structure of this interface, and we consider its implications and adaptive purposes. We argue that an increased understanding of person perception will likely require a synthesis of insights and techniques, from social psychology to the cognitive, neural, and vision sciences.

A thin slice of violence: distinguishing violent from nonviolent sex offenders at a glance

A growing body of literature in evolutionary psychology suggests that person perception processes are adaptively tuned. The current investigation tested the hypothesis that people would be able to detect a propensity for violence in other people, based only on a brief glance at their face. Participants estimated the propensity for violence in 87 registered sex offenders after seeing photos of them for 2 s each. Estimated likelihood of violence was significantly related to actual violent history, suggesting that violent tendencies can be accurately inferred from a brief look at a person's face. Cues indicative of high masculinity and high levels of male sex hormones (heavy brow, general facial masculinity, high physical strength, younger age) were related to accurate judgments. Other cues such as facial emotion and good grooming were not associated with an actual history of violence, but nevertheless correlated with raters' judgments. Although there were no sex differences in accuracy, on average women thought targets were more violent than men did. Findings speak to the accuracy and efficiency with which people can detect potential threats to physical well-being.

Death on the brain: effects of mortality salience on the neural correlates of ingroup and outgroup categorization

Research has shown that thoughts of one's; own death (i.e. mortality salience; MS) increase aspects of intergroup bias. However, the extent to which MS influences neural activity underlying basic person perception processes has not been examined. In the current study, event-related brain potentials were used as measures of online attentional and evaluative processes as White participants categorized ingroup (White) and outgroup (Black) faces according to expression (happy vs angry) following either MS or a control induction. Results showed that MS affected the amplitude of the P2 and N2 components elicited by ingroup faces but had no effect on the processing of outgroup faces. Processing of angry ingroup relative to angry outgroup faces was pronounced in the MS condition, reflected both in N2 amplitude and in longer latency of the P3 component, suggesting heightened sensitivity to threats to positive ingroup. Overall, findings suggest that MS intensifies perception of social category features, primarily by enhancing processing of ingroup cues.

Contextualizing person perception: Distributed social cognition.

Research on person perception typically emphasizes cognitive processes of information selection and interpretation within the individual perceiver and the nature of the resulting mental representations. The authors focus instead on the ways person perception processes create, and are influenced by, the patterns of impressions that are socially constructed, transmitted, and filtered through social networks. As the socially situated cognition perspective (E. R. Smith & G. R. Semin, 2004) suggests, it is necessary to supplement consideration of intra-individual cognitive processes with an examination of the social context. The authors describe a theoretical model of processes of distributed social cognition that takes account of 3 levels: the individual perceiver, the interacting dyad, and the social network in which they are embedded. The authors' model assumes that perceivers elicit or create as well as interpret impression-relevant information in dyadic interaction and that perceivers obtain information from 3rd-party sources who are linked to perceivers and targets in social networks. The authors also present results of a multiagent simulation of a subset of these processes. Implications of the theoretical model are discussed, for the possibility of correcting biases in person perception and for the nature of underlying mental representations of persons.

Ambiguous Group Membership Is Extracted Automatically From Faces

To economize the demands of person perception, individuals quickly and accurately categorize others into groups (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Indeed, for groups with salient perceptual markers (e.g., sex, age, race), category activation is deemed to be an unavoidable consequence of the person-perception process (Bargh, 1999; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). But what about social groups with less obvious physical cues, do they also trigger automatic person categorization? Recent data hint that this may, indeed, be the case. Take, for example, male sexual orientation. Although the cues to male sexual orientation are ostensibly ambiguous (yielding categorization accuracy of approximately 60-70% against a chance guessing rate of 50%), differences between gay and straight men can be judged significantly better than chance following very brief exposure to a target (i.e., 50 ms; Rule & Ambady, 2008) and can modulate incidental memory for previously encountered faces (Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2007). What these findings suggest is that, like sex, age, and race, information pertaining to male sexual orientation may be extracted automatically from faces (see Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2008). To explore this possibility, we employed a lexical decision task in which participants responded to gay and straight verbal associates after the presentation of facial primes. If exposure to a face is sufficient to trigger category activation (i.e., information pertaining to sexual orientation), performance should be facilitated on prime-congruent trials.

“Ain’t I a Woman?”: Towards an Intersectional Approach to Person Perception and Group-based Harms

Our research examines whether intersecting racial and gender identities affect person perception. Predominantly White undergraduates (292) from a large northeastern U.S. university categorized and rated pictures (Study 1) and videos (Study 2) of Black and White men and women. We supported three hypotheses: 1) intersectionality affects person perception processes, leading to gender categorization errors for Black women; 2) “Blackness” and “maleness” are highly associated for Black male and female targets; and, 3) women are perceived as unattractive proportionally to their perceived masculinity, leading Black women to be rated as less attractive than other women. We suggest that intersectional approaches are required in order to fully understand person perception. Further, the Black/male association may lead to unique harms for Black women.

Neurocognitive underpinnings of face perception: Further evidence of distinct person and group perception processes.

A model of social perception is presented and tested. The model is based on cognitive neuroscience models and proposes that the right cerebral hemisphere is more efficient at processing combinations of features whereas the left hemisphere is superior at identifying single features. These processes are hypothesized to produce person and group-based representations, respectively. Individuating or personalizing experience with an outgroup member was expected to facilitate the perception of the individuating features and inhibit the perception of the group features. In the presented study, participants were asked to learn about various ingroup and outgroup targets. Later, participants demonstrated that categorization response speeds to old targets were slower in the left hemisphere than in the right, particularly for outgroup members, as predicted. These findings are discussed for their relevance to models of social perception and stereotyping.

Choose your “buddy icon” carefully: The influence of avatar androgyny, anthropomorphism and credibility in online interactions

In both online and offline interactions, the visual representation of people influences how others perceive them. In contrast to the offline body, an online visual representation of a person is consciously chosen and not stable. This paper reports the results of a 2 step examination of the influence of avatars on the person perception process. Specifically, this project examines the reliance on visual characteristics during the online perception process, and the relative influence of androgyny, anthropomorphism and credibility. In the first step, 255 participants fill out a survey where they rated a set of 30 static avatars on their credibility, androgyny, and anthropomorphism. The second step is a between subjects experiment with 230 participants who interact with partners represented by one of eight avatars (high and low androgyny, and anthropomorphism by high and low credibility). Results show that the characteristics of the avatar are used in the person perception process. Causal modeling techniques revealed that perceptions of avatar androgyny influence perceptions of anthropomorphism, which influences attributions of both avatar and partner credibility. Implications of these results for theory, future research, and users and designers of systems using avatars are discussed.

The Influence of Synchrony and Sensory Modality on the Person Perception Process in Computer-Mediated Groups

This study examined the effects of synchrony and the number of cues on the person perception process in computer-mediated communication. One hundred and forty-two participants in groups of three or four engaged in collaboration over five weeks to develop oral reports, using alternate versions of communication systems or meeting face-to-face. Consistent with the hyperpersonal model, those using low cue media felt their partners were more credible, and reported more social attraction, less uncertainty, and more involvement in the interaction than those using high cue media. People interacting with synchronous media felt increased social attraction, self-reported involvement, and certainty. They also felt that their conversations were more effective, although this effect appeared mainly in low cue groups. Results of an exploratory path analysis suggest that future research should focus on causal chains rather than direct effects, and that intervening variables (such as involvement) may be central to our understanding of the effects of communication technology systems.

Is Person Categorization Modulated By Exemplar Typicality?

A dominant theme in social cognition is that people routinely simplify the person perception process by categorizing others on the basis of the social groups to which they belong. However, despite an extensive literature documenting the cognitive benefits of this strategy, a number of unresolved issues remain. In particular, how important is categorical fit to the process of person categorization? Are perceivers sensitive to variations in exemplar typicality? Using a flanker task and morphed facial stimuli, we investigated this issue by examining the extent to which categorical information is extracted from faces in which the features of two racial categories (i.e., Asian and Caucasian) are blended to varying degrees. The results revealed that participants are indeed sensitive to variations in exemplar typicality, even when their attention is not explicitly directed to the critical triggering stimuli. The theoretical and practical implications of this finding are considered.