Social Psychology

Lecture 4:

Person Perception & DeceptionJane Clarbour

Room PS/BOO7 email: jc129 Tel: (01904-43)-3168

Objectives

• Specify the kinds of social situations in which person perception is important.

• Give an account of what is meant by the self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Describe the basic principles of the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS).

• Evaluate tests of person perception.• Discuss the role of emotional control as a social

skill in deception ability

Introduction

• Definition of person perception– Forming of judgements about other people, particularly in

relation to their personality or mood

• Used in– Job interviews – can effect whole life– Psychiatric classification – Informal social contacts with others

• Judgements we make affect our behaviour towards others

Different approaches

• Person perception has been studied in a number of different ways:

– Systematic biases in perception– Attribution theory– Implicit theories of personality

• Focus on Accuracy and Deception

Impression Formation

• Our impressions of others are shaped by their communication

– Facial expressions. – Body movements. – Do people differ in using nonverbal

cues?• Can women "read" nonverbal cues better

than men?

Accuracy of person perception• Accuracy of person perception in

relation to the social skills model– Interviewer: ability to select right person

for the job– Accurate clinical diagnosis: to select

correct treatment– Marital satisfaction:

• happier marriages = better perception of partners non-verbal cues (Noller & Feeney, 1994)

Inaccuracy in person perception

Self-fulfilling prophecy • Self-fulfilling prophecy

– An initial false definition of the situation which evokes a new behaviour which makes the originally false conception come true

Example of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: ROSENTHAL & JACOBSON (1968)

• Children given IQ test

• 20% randomly assigned to an experimental condition – teachers told academic development exceptional)

• Retested at year end – experimental group showed sig. IQ improvement

Tests of Person Perception

• Dates back to 1920’s• Based on tests of IQ

– If possible to measure Indiv. Diffs in cognitive ability, also possible in social intelligence

• But – problems in the development of scales to measure perceptual accuracy– How do you know when someone is

accurately perceiving others?

The Profile of Non-verbal Sensitivity (PONS) Rosenthal et al., 1979

• A measure of people’s accuracy in the perception of non-verbal cues.– a 45-min b+w film made up of 220 numbered auditory and

visual segments:– Randomised presentation of 20 short scenes portrayed by

a young woman, each scene represented in different channels of NVC:

• Facial expression• Body from neck to knees• Content filtered voice • Randomised spliced voice and various combinations of these

cues

The PONS (Rosenthal et al., 1979)

• Criterion– All scenes were posed and 8 raters chose best

scenes for inclusion in PONS– Ss view the segments of the tape and are given

choice of 2 situations it might represent – The criterion is whether or not they agree with the

8 raters.

PONS: Problems of criterion

• There are a number of difficulties relating to the criterion for the PONS:

– Assumption that the original 8 raters are themselves reasonably perceptive

– Inter-observer agreement is no guarantee of validity

– Assumption of a particular model of NVC

Assumptions…

• If NV cues are learned, cultural specific code:– then the agreement of a number of representative

judges of that culture is a relatively good criterion against which to evaluate people’s performance.

• But, if NV cues are part of innate, unlearned responses to particular events:– then inter-observer agreement may be totally

irrelevant

PONS: Construct validity

• The PONS does measure what it is supposed to measure– Studies of occupational groups showed that

people supposed to do well at PONS tasks did perform the best:

• actors• students of visual arts• students of NVC

• Comparison studies compared the PONS with self-ratings and observer ratings of NV cues– Self-ratings do not correlate highly with PONS– Observer ratings were highly sig. (r .22 ;p<.0001)

PONS: typical findings (1)

• Sex: – consistent advantage for women

• Development: – sig. main effects for age, with increasing

accuracy for older Ss.

• Cultural variation:– Cross cultural samples performed worse

than Americans, but better than chance

PONS: typical findings (2)

• Intelligence– No correlation with IQ, but does correlate

with other measures of NV coding ability

• Psychiatric groups– Both by psychiatric diagnosis or measures

of psychoticism, more seriously disturbed patients do less well on PONS

• Scores improved with practice– Again, supports NVC as a social skill

PONS: evaluation

• PONS does have construct validity

• Does not use an objective criterion– This raises some doubts about the validity

of the test– So, the PONS is not an objective measure

of NVC

Objective tests (1)

• LA RUSSO (1978) Tested the clinical assumption that paranoid schizophrenics have special sensitivity to NVC– both groups saw 2 videos of people’s facial

expressions as watched 2 lights in 2 conditions• Condition 1: encoder’s facial expression after actually

receiving electric shock after red light, but no shock after white light

• Condition 2: encoder’s posed expression after both lights

2 x 2 Between Ss design

• Half Ss saw posed encodings

• Other half saw spontaneous encodings

Group C1

Shock after red light only

C2

Posed –

- no shock

24 Paranoid Schizophrenics 12 12

24 matched ‘normal’ controls 12 12

•Paranoid schizophrenics sig. more accurate than normal controls when judging posed encodings

The Social Interpretations Task (1)(Archer & Akert, 1977)

• Comprises 20 unposed sequences of spontaneous behaviour– paired with multiple-choice questions requiring

interpretation

– unambiguous criterion of accuracy • (e.g. In one scene, 2 men discuss a game of basketball

which they have just played, and the viewer is asked to judge which man won the game – The game did happen, and the researcher knows who won!)

The Social Interpretations Task (2) (Archer & Akert, 1977)

The SIT was given to students in 2 conditions:

1. Transcription of verbal content

2. A full-channel version

RESULTS: Ss in the transcript condition actually did sig. worse

than chance Ss in the video condition did sig. better than

chance.

Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT: Costanzo & Archer, 1989)

• The improved IPT now organised around 5 key areas of social interaction (each having 6 scenes) totalling 30 objective Q’s with scores on 5 dimensions.– Status (6 scenes)– Intimacy (6 scenes)– Kinship (6 scenes)– Competition (6 scenes)– Deception (6 scenes)

Predictive validityIPT (Costanzo & Archer, 1989)

• IPT given to 18 students on same floor of a dormitory • All Ss asked to complete a separate measure of their

peer’s social sensitivity • Peer rating scale comprised 4 items rated on a 9-

point scale (not true at all… very true)• Example items:

“ is sensitive to the feelings of others” and

“ is good at dealing with other people”.

• RESULTS:– Ss rated as more socially sensitive got significantly higher

scores on the IPT.

Other studies using IPT

1. SMITH, ARCHER, & COSTANZO (1991) using the IPT found sex differences in non-verbal cues:– Women perform better on the IPT than men– Women sig. under-estimate the number of

questions they had correctly answered– Men sig. over-estimate

• These findings are similar to findings by BELOFF (1992) in relation to IQ.

• This suggests that women either underestimate performance and men overestimate performance – or both!

COSTANZO & ARCHER (1991)

• Used the IPT to teach about non-verbal cues using a mixed 2 x 2 design:– Within-Ss variable:

• multiple-choice questions• essays

– Between Ss variable:• Taught using the IPT• Taught using traditional lecture

Results and Conclusions

• Results:– The IPT group got sig. better marks on the

essay question No diff. on the multiple-choice question

– The IPT group also rated the presentation sig. higher than did the lecture group

• Conclusion:– The IPT can be used to both objectively

assess skill in non-verbal decoding but also to improve non-verbal perceptiveness

Criticisms of the IPT• The tests of deception are somewhat

misleading.– Deception in naturally occurring situations may

have bad consequences if detected – but no danger in the clips recorded for the IPT

• Detection apprehension may in itself give cues to deceit.– Participants were TOLD to deceive – lacks

motivation

• No discussion of the possible implications of camera awareness

Deception as skilled social behaviour?

• Social Skills Inventory (SSI: Riggio et al)

– 3 types of skill involved in deception• Ability to send information (expressivity)

• Ability to receive information (encode)

• Ability to curtail spontaneous emotion, or pose artificial emotion

– Method:• Ratings on the SSI

• Ratings of social anxiety

• Video recordings of truthful/deceptive persuasive message

– Findings:• Socially anxious less believable (nervous cues?)

• Expressive Ss rated are more believable when deceiving

Summary

• Only recently have researchers compiled objective criteria of accuracy– The PONS suffers from lack of objectivity– Both the SIT and the IPT were developed using

objective criterion– People are very poor at detecting lies– Development of cross-cultural measures