Perceptual objectivity and the limits of perception

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Common sense takes the physical world to be populated by mind-independent particulars. Why and with what right do we hold this view? Early...     

Contextual variation and objectivity in olfactory perception

Synthese - According to Smell Objectivism, the smells we perceive in olfactory experience are objective and independent of perceivers, their experiences, and their perceptual systems. Variations in...     

Relativist ethics, scientific objectivity, and concern for human rights

This paper comments on the conflict between ethical relativism and anthropologists’ concerns with rights, and tries to show that neither scientific objectivity nor respect for cultural diversity require denying an extracultural stance for ethical judgments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a symposium entitled “Ethics in Science: Special Problems in Anthropology and Archaeology” held at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Philadelphia, PA, 15 February, 1998.     

Person perception by active versus passive perceivers

Person perception research is dominated by studies of passive perceivers who exert no control over the information they receive. In contrast, perceivers in everyday life can often actively choose the type and quantity of information they receive. In this study, active and yoked passive perceivers formed impressions of individuals based on information from Facebook. Compared to active perceivers, passive perceivers reported greater confidence and ease in their judgments. Passive perceivers exhibited greater confidence (though not greater accuracy) with increased information, but active perceivers did not show this effect, placing a boundary condition on past research. Passive perceivers also liked targets more than active perceivers, a finding that is not explained by valence-dependant sampling by active participants, or by misattribution of fluency or greater sensitivity among passive participants. These provocative findings highlight the need to account for active and interactive processes in person perception rather than continuing to focus on passive perceivers.     

Person perception as a function of occupation and sex

The purpose of this study was to assess perception of stimulus persons in sex-appropriate, sex-inappropriate, and neutral occupations, using the sexual dimension of the occupations, the sex of the person-in-occupation, and the sex of the perceiver as independent variables. Male and female Ss rated two stimulus persons (one female and one male) in each of 12 selected occupations (4 masculine, 4 feminine, and 4 neutral occupations) on 20 bipolar rating scales. The scales represented the following factors: Leadership, Interpersonal Adjustment and Likability, Professional and Intellectual Competence, Personal Adjustment, Social Sensitivity, Activity, Happiness in Home Life, Physical Attractiveness, and Liberalism and Individualism. Results indicated that sexual dimension of the occupation and the sex-appropriateness/inappropriateness of the occupation have strong effects on person perception.This study is based on part of a doctoral dissertation in psychology at the Ohio State University, under the direction of Samuel H. Osipow. Partial results were presented at the Western Psychological Association convention, April 1976. Thanks are extended to David Shinar for consultation and statistical analysis of the data.     

Person perception and the bounded rationality of social judgment

In this article, we develop a bounded rationality view of the relation between person perception and social behavior. Two theses of this approach are that behaviors vary in their significance to observers, and that observers pursue bounded rather than global utility in forming personality impressions. Observers are expected to be sensitive to targets' overall behavioral tendencies and to the variability of their behavior across situations, but both sensitivities are bounded, being greater for behaviors that directly affect observers' outcomes. In two investigations involving extensive hourly and 6-s observations, we examined the bounded utility of people's impressions of personality, demonstrating how impression accuracy is linked to the significance of behaviors. Observers were sensitive to the organization of aggressive behaviors, but less sensitive to the organization of withdrawn behaviors, even when the consistency of those behaviors was comparable. The results clarify the relation between people's inferential shortcomings in laboratory paradigms and the bounded utility of person perception in the natural environment.     

Person perception when aggressive or nonaggressive sports are primed

Previous research investigating the factors contributing to sports spectator violence has focused primarily on conscious processes such as the disinhibiting effects of aggressive models and physiological arousal. The current research borrows a methodology from social cognition work to examine the role of passive, category accessibility effects on fan hostility. Prior research has indicated that as a schema becomes more accessible in memory, the use of it to encode subsequent information is increased. It was therefore hypothesized that individuals for whom the category of hostility had been unobtrusively primed with aggressive-sports names (e.g., boxing) would rate an ambiguous target person as more hostile and as more likely to prefer hostile activities relative to persons who were primed with sports names which were not associated with violence (e.g., golf). The results supported the hypotheses, with subjects who were primed with aggressive-sports rating an unrelated target person's behavior as significantly more hostile and as more likely to prefer aggressive activities relative to subjects exposed to sentences containing references to nonaggressive-sports. Discussion includes the potential ramifications for spectator aggression at sporting events.     

Person perception informs understanding of cognition during visual search

Does person perception—the impressions we form from watching others—hold clues to the mental states of people engaged in cognitive tasks? We investigated this with a two-phase method: In Phase 1, participants searched on a computer screen (Experiment 1) or in an office (Experiment 2); in Phase 2, other participants rated the searchers’ video-recorded behavior. The results showed that blind raters are sensitive to individual differences in search proficiency and search strategy, as well as to environmental factors affecting search difficulty. Also, different behaviors were linked to search success in each setting: Eye movement frequency predicted successful search on a computer screen; head movement frequency predicted search success in an office. In both settings, an active search strategy and positive emotional expressions were linked to search success. These data indicate that person perception informs cognition beyond the scope of performance measures, offering the potential for new measurements of cognition that are both rich and unobtrusive.     

Person, situation, and person-by-situation interaction components in person perception

The hypothesis that people store situation and person-by-situation interaction information as well as trait information about one another's behavior was tested by administering modified S-R Inventories of Anxiousness and Hostility to 54 male and 59 female undergraduates. Subjects rated the strength of affect that would be evoked by a series of situations in the two same-sex college students whom they knew best, the best-known opposite-sex person, a casually known same-sex person, and the “average college student.” Indices were constructed to measure the extent of (a) perceived average differences among people (traits), (b)perceived average differences over situations, and (c) perceived person-by-situation interaction. Analyses of variance showed that: (a) the ratings of the two best-known same-sex persons and the best-known opposite-sex person contained more interactive information than did the ratings of a casually known person and (b) females perceived more situational variability in the behavior of their own sex than did males. The amount of perceived person-by-situation interaction did not differ as a function of sex of rater or affect to be rated. It was concluded that the naive psychologist, like many professional psychologists, is an interactionist.     

The objectivity of color and the color of objectivity

I am grateful to Peter King, David Lewis, George Schumm, Stewart Shapiro, Allan Silverman, William Taschek, Neil Tennant, and Mark Wilson for helpful and stimulating discussions; and especially to Diana Raffman and Michael Watkins for ongoing arguments about the importance of ongoing arguments about the ontology of color.     

On objectivity

The following definition of objective is proposed: A statement S is objective if and only if in S all parameters that are relevant to its truth value are made explicit. The objectivity of predicates and relations can be defined in a similar manner. This simple conception of objectivity-which could be called explicitness conception of objectivity-can be found in Hermann Weyl and plays a central part in the natural sciences. There are grades of objectivity depending on the quality and the number of parameters our predicates are relativized to A relativistic Ockham principle has to be recognized: Relativization parameters are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. The explicitness conception of objectivity is accessible to mathematical specifications, is the core of the idea of invariance, has a lot of philosophical applications and leads to precise notions of subjectivity and a precise formulation of the problem of the limits of objectivity.I am grateful to Andreas Bartels, Ulrich Gähde, Mark Helme, Andreas Kamlah, Andreas Kemmerling, Winfred Klink, Toni Koch, Hilary Putnam and Matthias Varga von Kibéd who have, in one way or another, contributed to the present content and form of this paper.     

Person perception: Effects of sex,marital status,and sex-typed occupation

A sample of 208 male college students evaluated a briefly described stimulus person on 20 7-point bipolar scales which described personality traits and professional performance characteristics. Each subject rated one of 16 persons who were described as either female or male; never married, divorced, widowed, or unmarried; and employed in either a feminine or masculine sex-typed occupation. Female stimulus persons generally were rated more favorably than male stimulus persons. The personality traits of married persons of both sexes were evaluated more favorably than those of unmarried persons. Individuals in sex-typical and sex-atypical occupations received similar evaluations.Parts of this article were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August 1981.     

Person perception across the menstrual cycle: hormonal influences on social-cognitive functioning

Women's reactions to men shift during the menstrual cycle. For example, during the phase of high conception risk, women prefer men with masculinized facial features. A favored explanation for this effect is that women display an enhanced sensitivity to stimuli that have significant reproductive relevance during the phase of the menstrual cycle in which conception risk is high. Consistent with this viewpoint, the present research demonstrated that women's cycle–dependent attentiveness to "maleness" also extends to basic aspects of the person–perception process. Specifically, during the phase of high conception risk, women displayed an enhanced ability both to categorize men and to access associated category–related (i.e., stereotypic) material from semantic memory. The implications of these findings for contemporary treatments of person perception are considered.     

Historical objectivity and value neutrality

To resolve the impasse between skeptic, idealist and positivist as to whether or not historical inquiry can be objective, an affirmative answer is argued by exposing, clarifying and challenging the common presupposition: the thesis of scientific value neutrality. The argument applies a more explicit version of the Braithwaite— Churchman‐Rudner position to history and thus challenges the prevalent claim that history, unlike the law, has but one goal, the establishment of truth about the past. The important yet neglected residual issue concerns what ‘objectivity’ means when inquiry (historical or scientific) is construed as a goal‐directed activity controlled by epistemic and pragmatic utilities.