Top-down influences in social perception

The present chapter makes a case for the importance of the study of social perception as a phenomenon separate from impression formation and social categorisation, and of great significance for social psychology. We claim specifically that the development of tasks for studying perception is critical for addressing the question of whether top-down processes influence perception. Three series of studies conducted by the authors, and which relied on newly developed tasks, are presented. The first two series examine the effects of emotion and adult attachment orientation on the perception of facial expression of emotion. The third examines the influences of emotion concepts on perceptual memory for facial expression. The studies together provide good support for influences of emotional state, personality factors, and prior knowledge on the perception of facial expression of emotion, and call, we hope, for greater attention to perceptual processes in social psychology.     

Interpersonal perception in a social context

Interpersonal perception among well-acquainted individuals in a social context was studied. High acquaintance was expected to provide perceivers with a large sample of target behaviors across situations. In turn, memory for acquaintances should be organized by social group and personality characteristics, as predicted by the social context-personality index theory. Differentiation of the target's traits in memory should produce a target effect on perception that is stronger than the perceiver effect. Furthermore, evidence for accuracy, meta-accuracy, independence of self- and other-perception, and reciprocity of affect were anticipated. A social relations analysis of data from a multiple-interaction, reciprocal design was used to study these phenomena. At the individual level, analyses indicated that perceptions of targets were determined primarily by target characteristics and secondarily by perceiver construction of the judgment. Also, perceivers judged targets as targets judged themselves, and targets knew in general how perceivers viewed them. Self- and other-perceptions were largely independent. Surprisingly, we did not observe dyadic meta-accuracy.     

Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality

A perceiver's actions, although based upon initially erroneous beliefs about a target individual may channel social interaction in ways that cause the behavior of the target to confirm the perceiver's beliefs. To chart this process of behavioral confirmation, we observed successive interactions between one target and two perceivers. In the first interaction, targets who interacted with perceivers who anticipated hostile partners displayed greater behavioral hostility than targets whose perceivers expected nonhostile partners. Only when targets regarded their actions as reflections of personal dispositions did these behavioral differences in hostility persevere into their subsequent interactions with naive perceivers who had no prior knowledge about them. Theoretical implications of the behavioral confirmation construct for social perception processes are discussed.     

Emotion perception explains age-related differences in the perception of social gaffes

Young (<36 years) and older (>59) adults viewed videos in which the same individual committed a faux pas, or acted appropriately, toward his coworkers. Older participants did not discriminate appropriate and inappropriate behaviors as well as young participants. Older participants also scored lower than young participants on an extensive battery of emotion recognition tests, and emotion performance fully mediated age differences in faux pas discrimination. The results provide further evidence for the role of emotion perception in a range of important social deficits.     

Psychiatric labeling and social perception

The present study explores the effects of three types of psychiatric labeling on attribution of causality and impression formation. It was found that observers tended to be more person-oriented in their attributions when explaining an accident of a person being labeled formerly mentally ill and formerly psychiatrically hospitalized, as compared to a non-psychiatric control label. However, no such tendency towards person-orientation in causal attribution was found for a problems-of-living label. These effects were found to be independent of variation in amount of neutral context information about the person being labeled. The effect of labeling on impression formation was found to be inconclusive, and reasons for this are discussed. Context information was found to affect impression formation in that the person was evaluated more positively. No sex differences in attribution of causality and impression formation was found.     

Emotional intelligence and social perception

One of the key facets of emotional intelligence (EI) is the capacity of an individual to recognise emotions in others. However, this has not been tested cross-culturally, despite the body of research indicating that people are better at recognising facial affect of members of their own culture. Given the emotion recognition aspect of EI, it would seem that EI should be related to correctly identifying emotion in others regardless of race. In order to test this, a social perception inspection time task was carried out in which participants (41 Caucasian and 46 Far-East Asian) were required to identify the emotion on Caucasian and Far-East Asian faces that were happy, sad, or angry. Results from this study indicate that EI was not related to correctly identifying facial expressions. The results did confirm that participants are better able to recognise people of their own ethnicity, though this was only applicable to negative emotions.     

Measuring human social perception directly

The perception of social behavior is direct when ecological correlates which specify a pattern are not manpulated. Spatial and temporal information appear to be two major correlates which facilitate human perception of ongoing social action. When these two correlates are disrupted in some fashion, the resulting action is ambiguous and its perception requires cognitive mediation on the part of the observers. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to current social perception theory and research.     

A judgement analysis of social perceptions of attitudes and ability

A judgement analysis of people's social inferences of attitudes and ability was conducted. University students were asked to infer the liberalness (N = 60; Study 1) or intelligence (N = 40; Study 2) of targets seen in pictures. Multiple regression analyses revealed that attractiveness was the most important cue for predicting inferences of liberalness, while an ethnic cue (i.e., being Asian) was the most important cue for judgements about intelligence. Results also showed that a single-cue model was less susceptible to overfitting, but significantly less accurate than a multiple-cue model in predicting participant's intelligence judgements. Although the multiple regression models suffered a degree of overfitting, cross validation showed that they continued to have significant predictive value when applied to new data. Furthermore, a “random partner” method (comparing each participant's own regression equation with that of another, randomly selected, participant) provided evidence of significant idiosyncratic variation in the way intelligence judgements were made.     

The perception of preschool social dominance

Children's and teachers' perception of social dominance was examined using a behavioral criterion for determining accuracy of verbal judgments. Video records of agonistic interactions were obtained during approximately 60 hours of free-play at two preschool centers. Analyses of social conflict episodes ending in submission revealed linear dominance structures for both groups. Dominance perception was assessed in two ways. Both teachers and children were asked to rank-order a subgroup of children according to dominance. They were also asked to select the more dominant children in a number of predetermined pairs. Results indicated that teachers could accurately judge dyadic dominance relations, and that accuracy among children varied as a function of their status within the group hierarchy. Findings have implications for social dominance assessment methodology, and for the issue of consensual versus ecological validity in developmental studies of social perception.