The beholder beheld: A study of social emotionality

The study reported in this paper is concerned with social emotions. These are defined as states which are experienced either exclusively or more intensively before a real or imagined audience. It is argued that when social emotions arise as a consequence of disrupting social rules, this is because the actor in question is aware of a discrepancy between his or her self-image, which is assumed to be neutral, and the image which he or she assumes to have conveyed to those who witness the incident, in a role-playing experiment, subjects were presented with four situations depicting disruptions of routine activity, two of which involved rule disruption. These situations were described from one of two perspectives (actor or observer) and set in one of two social contexts (public or private). Results confirmed the main predictions, which were (1) that in the case of rule disruptions, the emotionality attributed to the actor would be greater in public than in private; (2) that dispositional ratings of the actor would reveal a discrepancy between self image and public image, and that this discrepancy would covary with the actor's emotionality; and (3) that dispositional ratings of the actor would reveal a discrepancy between public image and subjective public image.     

The plausibility of the implausible: A critique of Snyder and Swann (1978)

Snyder and Swann (1978) advance an argument that individuals display a cognitive bias in testing hypotheses about the personal attributes of other people, i.e. they seek out information which is supportive of their hypothesis (hypothesis-confirming strategy). It is argued here that these authors confound the hypothesis a person might entertain (belief) with a hypothesis the person is asked to test (assigned task). The findings of two experimental studies in which task and belief were manipulated independently suggest that Snyder and Swann's (1978) results are due to the task manipulation and not to an hypothesis-confirming bias.     

A comparison of the common-sense and ‘scientific’ conceptions of extroversion—introversion

From research on the organization of implicit personality theory, and on the fakability of psychometrically sophisticated scales a general argument about the conceptual overlap between implicit personality theory and ‘scientific’ theories of personality is developed. This is tested in the case of the common-sense conception of extroversion—introversion, and that of Eysenck. The convergent validity of these two conceptions are found to be high enough to support the argument. The implications of the argument are discussed in relation to the correspondences between implicit personality theory and personality theory, and the functions of personality theory in psychology and implicit personality theory in everyday life.     

Unfolding the concept of person by verbal abuse

Examined the prevalence of an interpersonal device, namely insult types, in a collectivistic and individualistic cultural context as an index of how the concept of person is culturally constructed. Insults were divided into three general categories, individualistic (those that refer directly to a person), relational (those that refer to a person and his/her significant relations) and swear-words. An examination of the insults subjects produced in Catania, southern Italy (collectivistic), Trieste, northern Italy (individualistic) and Bologna, central Italy, partially confirmed the hypothesized differences in types of verbal abuse. In the collectivistic context instances of verbal abuse are significantly more likely to be directed to a person and his/her relations than in the individualistic context. The social psychological implications of these findings are discussed.     

The contribution of linguistic factors to attribute inferences and semantic similarity judgements

Two studies are reported which examine the contribution of linguistic factors to attribute inferences and semantic similarity judgements. For this purpose a new method is developed which allows us to examine the contribution of language as a symbolically shared system. The two studies show that a substantial amount of the variance in both attribute inferences and semantic similarity judgements is mediated by socially shared linguistic conventions. The implications of these findings and the methodology for social cognition, and some models of personality and affect are discussed.     

In search of explanations: A rejoinder to Borkenau

The main points raised by Borkenau against our challenge of the 'intuitive psychometrics' view of personality judgements are discussed, in particular his example of the link between school grades and intelligence. It is argued that the semantic similarity interpretation advanced in our paper is more adequate and more parsimonious than explanations in terms of psychometric reasoning.