Browsing by Subject "Social perception"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Answering Too Fast Or Too Slowly: Social Perceptions and Response Latency
    (1993) Spieler, Jennifer
    A set of two experiments investigated the effects of response latency on social attribution, and whether there is an optimal duration of response latency in which respondents are perceived as most honest, compliant, confident, and sincere. Experiment One involved a production task in which subjects adjusted the response latencies of a set of conversational dialogues to yield three durations: an optimal, a too long, and a too short. Correlational analyses on this data were insignificant, but an examination of the mean standard deviations suggested considerable inter-subject agreement on the durational values. Additionally, a regression analysis found that within-speech pauses are significant predictors of the optimal response latency. In Experiment Two ninety-six subjects listened to the adjusted conversational clips from Experiment One and made a series of social judgments about the respondents. Results suggest that an optimal response latency does exist, but such a duration is shorter than hypothesized. These findings are discussed in terms of their ramifications for conversational interaction and communication in general.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Inclusion and Exclusion: Implications for Stereotypic Judgments of Groups and Individuals
    (2004) Nussbaum, Jane; Perloe, Sidney; Le, Benjamin
    This paper presents a broad overview of various models of the judgment process, in an effort to place the present research within a larger theoretical context. Particular attention is paid to theories proposed by Parducci, Kahneman and Miller, Martin, Schwarz and Bless, Stapel and Koomen, and Mussweiler. The present research aimed to extend the prior finding that categorization of a moderately atypical exemplar as either within or without a group affects subsequent evaluations of both the group and the exemplar, but in opposite ways (Bless, Schwarz, Bodenhausen and Thiel, 2001). In this prior study, both assimilation and contrast effects were found. The present research, a methodologically similar study to Bless et al., employed a new method of presenting exemplar information (i.e., through film clips), intended to increase the ecological validity of the study, allowing participants to gather exemplar information from both auditory and visual domains. As well, the present research utilized a stereotyped group (i.e., the elderly) not used in the previous research. The results of this research did not support the main hypothesis. While people did evaluate the exemplar and the group differently, such evaluative differences were not the effect of differential categorization of the exemplar. It is hypothesized that the lack of empirical support for the main effects may have been due to the fact that the manipulation of the dependent variable was weak; alternately, the measure of the dependent variable may not have been effective. One strong and surprising--although interesting--interaction did emerge from the data analyses: an interaction between the order in which the targets were evaluated, and the evaluations of the targets themselves. Specifically, when the exemplar was evaluated first, evaluations of the exemplar and group were contrasted away from each other. It is suggested that this finding may be able to be accounted for by several factors--such as distinctiveness and category width--presented in prior judgment theories.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Social Judgments and Attitudes: Are the Two Related and if so How?
    (1989) Smith, Kevin C.; Perloe, Sidney
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Voice, A Truer Window to the Soul? : The Effects of Face/Voice Incongruency on Impression Formation
    (2006) Vandersall, Ellen J.; Boltz, Marilyn
    This study examined whether impression formation is influenced by the congruency of facial and vocal information. Levels of attractiveness and maturity were manipulated to create 32 congruent or incongruent pairings on the computer. Forty undergraduate participants were presented with a 17-second clip of a face/voice pairing and asked to make 6 perceptual judgments on the traits of trustworthiness, health, behavioral consistency, likeability, emotional stability, and intelligence. Participants also rated the congruency of each pairing after completing the set of perceptual judgment tasks. It was hypothesized that incongruent pairings would receive less favorable personality assessment than the congruent pairings. This prediction was in fact observed for the attractiveness dimension but not the maturity one. In addition, the voice had a greater impact than the face on all traits except health. These findings are discussed in terms of their relation to the theories of symmetry, averageness, and expectancy confirmation with respect to congruency manipulations.