Interpersonal engagement in social perception: The consequences of getting into the action.

Examined the effects on person perception of varying levels of observer-actor engagement using 60 undergraduates. Ss observed a male actor (confederate) responding to interview questions on a prerecorded videotape under 3 conditions of interpersonal engagement: Ss in a detachment condition knew that they were simply observing a tape; Ss in an anticipated-interaction condition knew that they were observing a tape but expected to interact subsequently with the actor; Ss in an actual-interaction condition thought that they were interacting with the actor over a video hook-up. Half of the Ss observed the actor preface his responses with a positive comment regarding the interviewer's question (positive actor); the other half observed the actor preface his responses with a negative comment (negative actor). It was predicted that anticipated-interaction Ss would demonstrate hopefulness by attributing the positive actor's behavior dispositionally and the negative actor's behavior situationally but that actual-interaction Ss would show the opposite causal attribution pattern in an attempt to protect or enhance their own self-esteem. Results confirm these predictions. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceiver-induced constraint: Interpretations of self-generated reality.

Two experiments, with 87 university students, examined whether perceivers tend to infer correspondent attitudes when an actor expresses opinions that the perceivers know to have been completely controlled by the perceivers themselves. Exp I demonstrated that such "inducers" of behavior were no more likely than observers to adjust their attributions for the constraining effects of their inducing behaviors when access to relevant situational information was equalized. Exp II replicated and clarified this finding. Inducers were just as likely to infer correspondent attitudes from constrained opinions when they were merely the instruments of behavioral induction (i.e., causing the actor to behave as the experimenter requested) as when they were the origins of behavioral induction (i.e., having a choice with regard to the actor's behavior). Results suggest that correspondence bias (the tendency to infer correspondent dispositions from constrained behavior) may not simply be a reflection of the relatively low salience of situtational forces and that inducers who are clearly aware of their control may nevertheless treat constrained behavior as diagnostic. The experiments also present a flexible paradigm for further studies of constraints induced by the social perceiver. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of intent and harm in judgments of prejudice and discrimination.

Four experiments examined how an actor's intent and the harm experienced by a target influence judgments of prejudice and discrimination. The presence of intent increased the likelihood that participants judged an actor as prejudiced and the actor's behavior as discriminatory. When intent was uncertain, harm influenced judgments of the behavior, which in turn influenced judgments of the actor, and participants were more cautious in their judgments about an actor than an actor's behavior. Harm also played a stronger role in targets' than observers' judgments. Understanding the role of intent and harm on perceptions of prejudice can help explain variations in targets' versus observers', and possibly targets' versus actors', judgments of discrimination and prejudice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Action embellishment: An intention bias in the perception of success.

Na?ve theories of behavior hold that actions are caused by an agent's intentions, and the subsequent success of an action is measured by the satisfaction of those intentions. However, when an action is not as successful as intended, the expected causal link between intention and action may distort perception of the action itself. Four studies found evidence of an intention bias in perceptions of action. Actors perceived actions to be more successful when given a prior choice (e.g., choose between 2 words to type) and also when they felt greater motivation for the action (e.g., hitting pictures of disliked people). When the intent was to fail (e.g., singing poorly), choice led to worse estimates of performance. A final experiment suggested that intention bias works independent from self-enhancement motives. In observing another actor hit pictures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, shots were distorted to match the actor's intentions, even when it opposed personal wishes. Together these studies indicate that judgments of action may be automatically distorted and that these inferences arise from the expected consistency between intention and action in agency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of behavioral intentions and consequences on judgments of the actor and other: An S-V-O analysis.

Used an extension of H. F. Gollob's (1974) subject–verb–object (S–V–O) model of social inference to investigate the effects of information about behavioral intentions and consequences on judgments of both an actor and the person toward whom the behavior is directed. In Exp I, 48 undergraduates received one or more pieces of information about an attribute of the actor, the actor's intentions to help or hinder the other, the actual consequences of this action (whether the other is helped or hindered), and an attribute of the other. Judgments of actors' admirableness increased with the favorableness of the adjectives describing them, the favorableness of both their intentions and the consequences of their actions, the justness of their intentions and of the consequences of their actions, and their ability to produce the consequences they intended. Behavioral consequences appeared to affect judgments of both the actor and the other independently of the actor's intentions. Exp II, with 51 undergraduates, demonstrated that the effects of information on judgments of the actor depended on the dimension of judgment in predictable ways and suggested that judgments of admirableness may be mediated by perceptions of both virtuousness and competence. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intuitions about situational correction in self and others.

People's attributional phenomenology is likely to be characterized by effortful situational correction. Drawing on this phenomenology and on people's desire to view themselves more favorably than others, the authors hypothesized that people expect others to engage in less situational correction than themselves and to make more extreme dispositional attributions for constrained actors' behavior. In 2 studies, people expected their peers to make more extreme dispositional inferences than they did themselves for a situationally constrained actor's behavior. People's expectation that they engage in more situational correction than their peers was diminished among Japanese participants, who have less desire to view themselves as superior to their peers (Study 3), and among participants who were led to view dispositional attributions more favorably than situational attributions (Study 4). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How Two Share a Task: Corepresenting Stimulus-Response Mappings.

Previous research has shown that individuals unintentionally adjust their behavior to others by mimicking others' actions and by synchronizing their actions with others. This study investigated whether individuals form a representation of a coactor's task when the context does not require interpersonal coordination. Pairs of participants performed a reaction time (RT) task alongside each other, responding to 2 different dimensions of the same stimulus. Results showed that each actor's performance was influenced by the other's task. RTs on trials that required a response from both participants were slowed compared with trials that required only a response from 1 actor. Similar results were observed when each participant knew the other's task but could not observe the other's actions. These findings provide evidence that shared task representations are formed in social settings that do not require interpersonal coordination and emerge as a consequence of how a social situation is conceptualized (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gender stereotypes and social inferences: A developmental study.

Investigated changes between childhood and adulthood in reliance on gender stereotypes when making inferences about another person. 36 children from each of 3 age groups (kindergarten [mean age 5 yrs 8 mo], 3rd grade [mean age 8 yrs 9 mo], and 6th grade [mean age 11 yrs 8 mo]) and 36 college students were told that a boy or a girl had chosen activities consistent or inconsistent with gender stereotypes. Ss were asked to predict the actor's future behavior, rate the actor on several traits, and estimate the actor's popularity with peers. College students predicted that the actor's future behavior would be approximately as consistent (or inconsistent) with gender stereotypes as their past behavior. College students' ratings of the actor's traits and their judgments about the popularity of boys were also influenced by the actor's past behavior. Sixth graders showed a similar pattern of social inferences, but the effects of the actor's past behavior were weaker than at college age. By contrast, 3rd graders predicted that the actor's future behavior would be stereotypical, even if his or her past behavior was not. Past behavior had some effect on 3rd graders' trait ratings but not on their popularity judgments. At kindergarten, only predictions for a girl's future behavior were affected by past-behavior information. The age differences are discussed in the context of current models of the development and functioning of gender stereotypes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Viewpoint and the recognition of people from their movements.

Observers can recognize other people from their movements. What is interesting is that observers are best able to recognize their own movements. Enhanced visual sensitivity to self-generated movement may reflect the contribution of motor planning processes to the visual analysis of human action. An alternative view is that enhanced visual sensitivity to self-motion results from extensive experience seeing one's own limbs move. To investigate this alternative explanation, participants viewed point-light actors from first-person egocentric and third-person allocentric viewpoints. Although observers routinely see their own actions from the first-person view, participants were unable to identify egocentric views of their own actions. Conversely, with little real-world experience seeing themselves from third-person views, participants readily identified their own actions from allocentric views. When viewing allocentric displays, participants accurately identified both front and rear views of their own actions. Because people have little experience observing themselves from behind or from third-person views, these findings suggest that visual learning cannot account for enhanced visual sensitivity to self-generated action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Suspicion of ulterior motivation and the correspondence bias.

Three studies examined the hypothesis that when perceivers learn of the existence of multiple, plausibly rival motives for an actor's behavior, they are less likely to fall prey to the correspondence bias than when they learn of the existence of situational factors that may have constrained the actor's behavior. In the 1st 2 studies, Ss who learned that an actor was instructed to behave as he did drew inferences that corresponded to his behavior. In contrast, Ss who were led to suspect that an actor's behavior may have been motivated by a desire to ingratiate (Study 1), or by a desire to avoid an unwanted job (Study 2), resisted the correspondence bias. The 3rd study demonstrated that these differences were not due to a general unwillingness on the part of suspicious perceivers to make dispositional inferences. The implications that these results have for understanding attribution theory are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tuning in to another person's action capabilities: Perceiving maximal jumping-reach height from walking kinematics.

Three experiments investigated the ability to perceive the maximum height to which another actor could jump to reach an object. Experiment 1 determined the accuracy of estimates for another actor's maximal reach-with-jump height and compared these estimates to estimates of the actor's standing maximal reaching height and to estimates of the perceiver's own maximal reaching and reach-with-jump height. Perception of another actor's maximum reach-with-jump height was less accurate than the other estimates, but still accurate to within 8% error. The actor's reach-with-jump height was modified in Experiment 2 by attaching weights around the actor's ankles. Perceivers, who were explicitly aware of the manipulation, adjusted their maximum reach-with-jump estimates for the actor accordingly. In Experiment 3, perceivers were not explicitly aware of the weight manipulation, but provided significantly lower maximum reach-with-jump estimates after watching the actor walk while wearing the weights compared to estimates obtained after watching the actor walk while not wearing the weights. The results suggest that the actor's walking pattern was informative about the actor's capacity to produce a different action, jumping to reach an object. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceiving affordances for another person's actions.

The perception of affordances for the actions of other people (actors) was examined. Observers judged the maximum and preferred sitting heights of tall and short actors. Judgments were scaled in centimeters, as a proportion of the observer's leg length, and as a proportion of each actor's leg length. In Experiment 1 observers viewed live actors standing next to a chair. When judgments were scaled by actor leg length, they reflected the actual ordinal relation between the capabilities of the actors. The perception of affordances from kinematic displays was then evaluated. Observers differentiated tall and short actors, but only when the displays contained direct information about relations between the actors and the chair. It is concluded that observers can perceive affordances for the actions of actors and that kinematic displays can be enough to support such percepts if they preserve actor–environment relations that define affordances. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The norm of self-interest and its effects on social action.

Four studies investigated whether people feel inhibited from engaging in social action incongruent with their apparent self-interest. Participants in Study 1 predicted that they would be evaluated negatively were they to take action on behalf of a cause in which they had no stake or in which they had a stake but held stake-incongruent attitudes. Participants in Study 2 reported both surprise and anger when a target person took action on behalf of a cause in which he or she had no stake or in which he or she held stake-incongruent attitudes. In Study 3, individuals felt more comfortable engaging in social action and expected others to respond more favorably toward their actions if the issue was described as more relevant to their own sex than to the opposite sex. In Study 4, the authors found that providing nonvested individuals with psychological standing rendered them as likely as vested individuals to undertake social action. The authors discuss the implications of these results for the relationship between vested interest, social action, and attitude–behavior consistency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Vicarious dissonance: Attitude change from the inconsistency of others.

Three studies support the vicarious dissonance hypothesis that individuals change their attitudes when witnessing members of important groups engage in inconsistent behavior. Study 1, in which participants observed an actor in an induced-compliance paradigm, documented that students who identified with their college supported an issue more after hearing an ingroup member make a counterattitudinal speech in favor of that issue. In Study 2, vicarious dissonance occurred even when participants did not hear a speech, and attitude change was highest when the speaker was known to disagree with the issue. Study 3 showed that speaker choice and aversive consequences moderated vicarious dissonance, and demonstrated that vicarious discomfort--the discomfort observers imagine feeling if in an actor's place--was attenuated after participants expressed their revised attitudes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The actor as context for social judgments: effects of prior impressions and stereotypes

Three experiments identified conditions under which trait judgments made about a behavior were more likely to influence later judgments of the behavior. In Experiment 1, participants made trait judgments about numerous behaviors presented with photos of actors. Some behaviors were repeated, paired with the same or a different actor. All repeated behaviors were judged faster than new behaviors. Facilitation was greatest when repeated behaviors were paired with the same actor, suggesting greater influence of prior judgments in this condition. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated this effect, and the pattern of response times (RTs) suggested a stronger association between the actor and behavior when a prior impression of the actor had been formed (Experiment 2) and when the behavior was stereotypic of the actor's group (Experiment 3). Level of prejudice moderated RT patterns in Experiment 3. Implications for context effects, the nature of trait inferences, and stereotype change are discussed.     

Common-sense models of illness: The example of hypertension.

Hypothesized that actions taken to reduce health risks are guided by the actor's subjective or common-sense constructions of the health threat and that illness threats are represented by their labels and symptoms (their identity), their causes, consequences, and duration. These attributes are represented at 2 levels: as concrete, immediately perceptible events and as abstract ideas. Both levels guide coping behavior. 230 patients were interviewed about hypertension, presumably an asymptomatic condition. When asked if they could monitor blood pressure changes, 46% of 50 nonhypertensive, clinic control cases said yes, as did 71% of 65 patients new to treatment, 92% of 50 patients in continuing treatment, and 94% of 65 re-entry patients who had previously quit and returned to treatment. Patients in the continuing treatment group, who believed the treatment had beneficial effects on their symptoms, reported complying with medication and were more likely to have their blood pressure controlled. Patients new to treatment were likely to drop out of treatment if (1) they had reported symptoms to the practitioner at the 1st treatment session, or (2) they construed the disease and treatment to be acute. Data suggest that patients develop implicit models or beliefs about disease threats, which guide their treatment behavior, and that the initially most common model of high blood pressure is based on prior acute, symptomatic conditions. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Consensus information and fundamental attribution error: The role of development and in-group versus out-group knowledge.

24 4-yr-olds, 24 9-yr-olds, and 24 undergraduates watched a target actor select an item from an array, and other actors either agreed (high consensus) or disagreed (low consensus) with the choice. Actors were either peers or nonpeers of the Ss, and the target's choice did or did not match the S's own preference. Ss were asked why the actor liked the chosen object best. Ss in all age groups appropriately used the consensus information. Nine-year-olds and adults, however, were much less likely to use the consensus information when judging peers than when judging nonpeers, suggesting the use of self-provided consensus information. Four-yr-olds made greater entity attributions when they agreed with the target actor's choice than when they disagreed, suggesting that young children use self-reference as a basis for normative expectancies. There was also a developmental shift in general attributional bias. Nine-year-olds and adults had a person bias for peer targets, but they had no attribution bias for nonpeer targets. Four-year-olds had an entity bias for both peer and nonpeer targets. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributes and attributions: Inferring stimulus properties, actors' dispositions, and causes.

Actors' and observers' use of sample base-rate data was explored in 3 experiments with a total of 176 undergraduates. Observers used sample base rates to infer the properties of actors' environments and, by comparing actors' behaviors with sample performance, the actors' attributes. Actors, on the other hand, ignored sample base rates when inferring the properties of stimuli to which they were responding but, surprisingly, used base rates to infer their own attributes. Observers' causal attributions were more sensitive to base-rate information than were actors'. In Exps I and II, actors attributed their behavior to environmental properties even though their behavior was always discrepant from that of the sample. Observers, on the other hand, attributed actors' nonnormative behavior to actors' dispositions. In Exp III, observers attributed actors' behavior more to stimulus attributes and less to actors' attributes when the behavior was similar to (normative) rather than discrepant from (nonnormative) that of the sample. Actors' attributions were not influenced by the consensus manipulation. Data are discussed in terms of the research and theory on the informativeness of consensus. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of oxytocin and prosocial behavior on brain responses to direct and vicariously experienced pain.

In this study, we tested the validity of 2 popular assumptions about empathy: (a) empathy can be enhanced by oxytocin, a neuropeptide known to be crucial in affiliative behavior, and (b) individual differences in prosocial behavior are positively associated with empathic brain responses. To do so, we measured brain activity in a double-blind placebo-controlled study of 20 male participants either receiving painful stimulation to their own hand (self condition) or observing their female partner receiving painful stimulation to her hand (other condition). Prosocial behavior was measured using a monetary economic interaction game with which participants classified as prosocial (N = 12) or selfish (N = 6), depending on whether they cooperated with another player. Empathy-relevant brain activation (anterior insula) was neither enhanced by oxytocin nor positively associated with prosocial behavior. However, oxytocin reduced amygdala activation when participants received painful stimulation themselves (in the nonsocial condition). Surprisingly, this effect was driven by "selfish" participants. The results suggest that selfish individuals may not be as rational and unemotional as usually suggested, their actions being determined by their feeling anxious rather than by reason. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)