Direct social perception of others’ subjective time

In this paper, I deploy Gallagher et al.’s theory of Direct Social Perception (DSP) to help explain how we perceive others’ subjective time. This process of second-person temporal perception plays an important role in interpersonal interaction, yet is often glossed over in discussions of intersubjectivity. Using A.D. Craig (2009) ‘awareness’ model of subjective time to unify converging evidence that subjective time is embodied, affective, and situated, I argue that subjective time cannot be considered as a hidden or invisible aspect of a private mind, but is partially externally visible through our gestures, expressions, and other behaviours as they unfold within a particular context. My central thesis is that, in face to face interactions, we are able to directly perceive these visible components of other people’s subjective time. This is made possible by our “enculturated” (Menary, 2015) and enactive perceptual faculties. The process of social perception is not a passive, unidirectional affair where static information about one person’s subjective time is transmitted to the other, but rather inextricably linked with action (both at the personal and subpersonal level) and interaction effects produced by a dynamic coupling between participants. Such an enactive perspective reveals how others’ subjective time can be perceived in everyday interactions.     

Judgements of others’ emotional appropriateness are multidimensional

This study investigated the multidimensional structure of judgements of emotional appropriateness, the degree to which an observer judges a target's emotion to conform to observer-valued expectations for emotion in that context. Participants (N=169) were shown one of two brief video clips of an actor either showing anger or neutral expressions in an anger-evoking situation of either low, medium, or high severity. Participants rated the target's emotion on the Perception of Emotion Appropriateness Rating Scale (PEARS), which taps observers’ perceptions of a target's emotional appropriateness for a specific situation. We found that appropriateness ratings are comprised of three factors, assessment of Type Present (type of emotion in expression); Type Absent (missing key emotions); and Intensity (intensity with which the emotion is felt or expressed). Results are discussed in terms of the usefulness of a multidimensional conceptualisation of emotional appropriateness.     

“End-of-life” biases in moral evaluations of others

When evaluating the moral character of others, people show a strong bias to more heavily weigh behaviors at the end of an individual’s life, even if those behaviors arise in light of an overwhelmingly longer duration of contradictory behavior. Across four experiments, we find that this “end-of-life” bias uniquely applies to intentional changes in behavior that immediately precede death, and appears to result from the inference that the behavioral change reflects the emergence of the individual’s “true self”.     

Fred Rogers and children’s spirituality: valuing the uniqueness of others and caring for others

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was a safe haven advocating kindness, empathy, and caring for all children. Making everyone feel loved, Fred Rogers captured the attention and curiosity of young children across America with his compassionate manner, intentional listening skills, and respect for all individuals by encouraging children to feel good about themselves. This article explores the ministry of Fred Rogers and how his approach to children's spirituality focused on valuing the uniqueness of each individual, human connections through play, and caring for others by recognizing spiritual moments and teaching the whole child while appreciating the uniqueness of others. His genuine and patient presence had a healing quality, creating a world for children in which real learning and unconditional love could flourish. The messages of tolerance and acceptance by recognizing and respecting other's beliefs, and unconditional love and care, were beacons of hope for all.     

Why does the gaze of others direct visual attention?

Viewing another person directing his or her gaze can produce automatic shifts of covert visual attention in the same direction. This holds true even when the task‐relevant target is much more likely to occur at the uncued location. These findings, along with other evidence, have been taken to suggest that gaze represents a “special” stimulus—the foundation of a social cognition system that can make inferences about the mental states of other people. However, gaze‐driven cueing effects could simply be due to spatial compatibility between cue and target. We compared the attentional effects of gaze shifts to a face with the tongue extended laterally to the left or right. When tongue direction was a nonpredictive cue, we found cueing effects from tongues that were indistinguishable from those produced by gaze. However, in contrast to previous findings with gaze, tongue cues did not overcome a validity manipulation in which targets were four times more likely to appear at the uncued location. We conclude that simple attentional cueing effects from gaze may be better explained by spatial compatibility, and that more complex, unique features of cueing from gaze may be better indices into perceptual systems specialized for social cognition.     

Can we correctly perceive the reaching range of others?

Little is known about our ability to predict the motor capacities of other people. This study explored how observers perceive the reaching range of another person by asking them to judge the reachability of a moving object. Experiments 1 and 2 found that observers overestimated the reaching ranges of both short and tall people. Estimates were larger when objects moved towards rather than away from the person. Experiment 3 showed that perceived reaching range depended on the observer's viewing perspective. Compared with previous findings, these results suggest that observers use different cognitive operations to mentally simulate actions for themselves vs. others. They also inform the current debate about motor imagery and action understanding.     

Do unto others as others have done unto you?: Perceiving sexism influences women's evaluations of stigmatized racial groups

The present research examines how making discrimination salient influences stigmatized group members' evaluations of other stigmatized groups. Specifically, three studies examine how salient sexism affects women's attitudes toward racial minorities. White women primed with sexism expressed more pro-White (relative to Black and Latino) self-report (Studies 1 and 3) and automatic (Study 2) intergroup bias, compared with White women who were not primed with sexism. Furthermore, group affirmation reduced the pro-White/antiminority bias White women expressed after exposure to sexism (Study 3), suggesting the mediating role of social identity threat. Overall, the results suggest that making discrimination salient triggers social identity threat, rather than a sense of common disadvantage, among stigmatized group members, leading to the derogation of other stigmatized groups. Implications for relations among members of different stigmatized groups are discussed.     

Know versus Familiar: Differentiating states of awareness in others’ subjective reports of recognition

In the Remember–Know paradigm whether a Know response is defined as a high-confidence state of certainty or a low-confidence state based on familiarity varies across researchers and can influence participants’ responses. The current experiment was designed to explore differences between the states of Know and Familiar. Participants studied others’ justification statements to “Know” recognition decisions and separated them into two types. Crucially, participants were not provided definitions of Know and Familiar on which to sort the items—their judgements were based solely on the phenomenology described in the justifications. Participants’ sorting decisions were shown to reliably map onto expert classification of Know and Familiar. Post-task questionnaire responses demonstrated that both the level of memory detail and confidence expressed in the justifications were central to how participants categorised the items. In sum, given no instructions to do so, participants classify Familiar and Know according to two dimensions: confidence and amount of information retrieved.     

Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the understanding of others’ intention

Philosophical and neuroscientific investigation on intentional actions focused on several different aspects, making difficult to define what should be meant with the concept of intention. Most of our everyday actions are constituted by complex and finely organized motor sequences, planned and executed in order to attain a desired final goal. In this paper, we will identify the final goal of the action as the motor intention of the acting individual. First, we will review the relative contribution of the vast neuroscientific literature on the role of different cortical areas in the organization of goal-directed movement. In particular, we will describe recent data on the cortical organization of natural action sequences, showing that this organization could be at the basis not only of our capacity of acting intentionally, but also of our ability to understand the motor intentions underlying others’ behaviour which is crucial during social interactions.     

Normative theories of argumentation: are some norms better than others?

Norms—that is, specifications of what we ought to do—play a critical role in the study of informal argumentation, as they do in studies of judgment, decision-making and reasoning more generally. Specifically, they guide a recurring theme: are people rational? Though rules and standards have been central to the study of reasoning, and behavior more generally, there has been little discussion within psychology about why (or indeed if) they should be considered normative despite the considerable philosophical literature that bears on this topic. In the current paper, we ask what makes something a norm, with consideration both of norms in general and a specific example: norms for informal argumentation. We conclude that it is both possible and desirable to invoke norms for rational argument, and that a Bayesian approach provides solid normative principles with which to do so.     

Motivational synchronicity: Priming motivational orientations with observations of others’ behaviors

Two experiments tested the motivational synchronicity hypothesis, according to which observation of a target person’s behavior implying an intrinsic or an extrinsic motivational orientation primes the observers’ corresponding motivational orientation. Experiment 1 revealed that participants exposed to a target person intrinsically motivated to perform a task, relative to those exposed to an extrinsically motivated target person, showed greater intrinsic motivation (free-choice persistence) for the same task. Experiment 2 extended this in two important ways: (1) different tasks were used for the target and participant in order to rule out an expectation-based interpretation of the results, and (2) performance on an activity known to be facilitated by intrinsic motivation was used as the dependent measure. It appears that simply observing others’ motivational orientations influences the accessibility of the observers’ corresponding motivational orientation.     

What do infants understand of others’ action? A theoretical account of early social cognition

Intention reading and action understanding have been reported in ever-younger infants. However, the notions of intention attribution and action understanding, as well as their relation to each other, are surrounded by much confusion, making it difficult to assess the meaning and value of such findings. In this paper we set out to clarify the notions of ‘action understanding’ and ‘intention attribution’. We will show that what is commonly referred to as ‘action understanding’ in fact encompasses various heterogeneous association and prediction mechanisms. In general, these forms of action understanding will not result in the attribution of an intention to an observed actor. By detaching intention attribution from action understanding, and by exposing the latter as an umbrella notion, we provide a theoretical framework on early social cognition that allows for better comparison of findings from different experimental paradigms, and better assessment of infant action understanding abilities. Taking into account the plurality of forms that action understanding can adopt will help cognitive neuroscience to gain a full understanding of the early roots of social cognition.     

When do individuals help close others improve? The role of information diagnosticity

On the basis of the self-evaluation maintenance model (SEM; Tesser, 1988), it was hypothesized that individuals give less improving information to relationally close (rather than distant) others, out of concern for being outperformed by close others in the future. Further, this effect only occurs if diagnostic and valid criteria for success are present. Three studies confirmed the hypotheses. In Studies 1 and 2, participants gave less improving information to familiar than to unfamiliar others in a domain (academics) in which diagnostic assessment criteria (grades) were available. This pattern was not found in a domain (social life) without diagnostic criteria. These results were replicated in Study 3, in which relative performance and diagnosticity of assessment criteria were manipulated and amount of improving information given to friends and strangers was measured. Diagnosticity of comparison information is an important addition to the SEM model.     

Dreading the pain of others? Altruistic responses to others' pain underestimate dread

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed ‘dread’, is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. However, despite many accounts of altruistic responses to pain in others, no previous studies have tested whether people take delay into account when attempting to ameliorate others' pain. We examined the impact of delay in 2 experiments where participants (total N = 130) specified the intensity and delay of pain either for themselves or another person. Participants were willing to increase the experimental pain of another participant to avoid delaying it, indicative of dread, though did so to a lesser extent than was the case for their own pain. We observed a similar attenuation in dread when participants chose the timing of a hypothetical painful medical treatment for a close friend or relative, but no such attenuation when participants chose for a more distant acquaintance. A model in which altruism is biased to privilege pain intensity over the dread of pain parsimoniously accounts for these findings. We refer to this underestimation of others' dread as a ‘Dread Empathy Gap’.     

Do self-reported decision styles relate with others’ impressions of decision quality?

Research has demonstrated the usefulness of decision styles for predicting various performance-related criteria. It is still unclear, however, which particular styles are associated with a general tendency to make high-quality decisions. Participants (n = 168) completed a common measure of five decision styles, along with a measure of the traits in the five-factor model of personality. Self and peer evaluations of general decision quality were obtained as performance criteria. Results showed that specific decision styles predicted variance in both measures of decision quality. And, there was clear evidence for incremental validity for specific decision styles when self-ratings were predicted. In the context of past research, this study supports a primary focus on rational or analytical styles for understanding and predicting decision success.     

Helping others or helping oneself? An episodic examination of the behavioral consequences of helping at work

Scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), with a particular emphasis on helping others at work. In addition, recent empirical work has focused on how OCB is an intraindividual phenomenon, such that employees vary daily in the extent to which they help others. However, one limitation of this research has been an overemphasis on well‐being consequences associated with daily helping (e.g., changes in affect and mental depletion) and far less attention on behavioral outcomes. In this study, we develop a self‐regulatory framework that articulates how helping others at work is a depleting experience that can lead to a reduction in subsequent acts of helping others, and an increase in behaviors aimed at helping oneself (i.e., engaging in political acts). We further theorize how two individual differences—prevention focus and political skill—serve as cross‐level moderators of these relations. In an experience sampling study of 91 full‐time employees across 10 consecutive workdays, our results illustrate that helping is a depleting act that makes individuals more likely to engage in self‐serving acts and less likely to help others. Moreover, the relation of helping acts with depletion is strengthened for employees who have higher levels of prevention focus.     

How schoolchildren’s acceptance of self and others relate to their attitudes to victims of bullying

Previous research has indicated that harm to the mental health of children who are repeatedly victimised by their peers at school can be ameliorated through social or emotional support provided by other students. In this study we examined whether student provictim attitudes are related to more basic attitudes to self and attitudes to others. Measures of these attitudes were developed for use with children, and shown to be internally consistent and possess concurrent validity. Relations between these variables were then examined with a sample of Australian school children ( $N = 212$ ) aged between 9 and 14 years. Provictim attitudes correlated significantly ( $r = .55$ ) with acceptance of others, but not with acceptance of self ( $r = -.04$ ). Controlling for age and gender, multiple regression analyses confirmed these findings. Attitudes to victims were less positive for older students ( $r = -.22$ ). Gender differences, however, were not significant. These findings suggest that among schoolchildren self-acceptance is unrelated to positive attitudes towards victims, whereas acceptance of others has a moderately strong relation with provictim attitude. Implications for improving attitudes to victims among school children were examined.     

Facing still faces: What visual cues affect infants’ observations of others?

We used eye-tracking technique to examine gaze shifts of 9-, 16-, and 24-month-old infants who were presented with still images of a conversation between two individuals facing each other or turning away from each other. The results showed that body orientation, as measured by the face-to-face effect, is sufficient to provide infants with crucial information about others’ social engagement.