Perceiving Others

The Psychology of Interpersonal Perception

Mark Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000394818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología social

Originally published in 1979, Perceiving Others is an excellent, short introduction to the area of social psychology known as 'person perception', 'social perception' or 'impression formation' – how people interpret each others' moods, predict each others' behaviour and sum up each others' characters. The way people see each other determines the way they behave towards each other making the study of 'person perception' essential to the understanding of social behaviour.

Mark Cook poses three questions about how people form opinions of others: what are the processes involved, what information is used and how, and how accurate are they? He provides an answer to these questions in the three main sections of the book, giving a comprehensive survey of the theory and research arising from the issues involved. The topics covered include the meaning of trait descriptions, intuition, social skill and non-verbal communication, the impression formation paradigm, stereotypes, implicit personality theories, attribution theory, Cronbach's components and psychiatric diagnosis. By drawing many of his illustrations from everyday encounters, the author effectively bridges the gap between theory and reality to create a thoroughly readable and comprehensible study.

1 THE PROBLEM
Issues in person perception

I do not love thee, Dr Fell

The reason why I cannot tell

But this alone I know full well,

I do not love thee, Dr Fell

Thomas Brown, 1663–1704

Most people don’t often stop to ask themselves about the opinions they form about other people, about how and why they form them, nor about their correctness. They choose their friends without knowing why; they trust some people and not others, but can’t say why; they ask one girl for a date and not another for no apparent reason; they get married in blissful ignorance of what their partners are really like. Paradoxically the opposite often happens too; people form opinions about others, assert them dogmatically, and allow them to determine their whole attitude toward another. How often do people form an ‘instant dislike’? Or insist, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that someone is entirely trustworthy? Forming opinions about other people can be a profession; in as short a space of time as five minutes, the interviewer decides on a person’s suitability for employment, promotion or admission to higher education, and thereby affects that person’s life for years to come. Many interviewers have a well-developed sense of their own infallibility, coupled with a near total lack of insight into how they reach their verdicts.

The purpose of this book is to cast a critical eye over the way people perceive each other, a field of research traditionally given the rather clumsy and not entirely appropriate name ‘person perception’. Seeing someone drop a hammer for the third time and saying ‘clumsy’ to oneself goes quite a bit beyond the usual meaning of ‘perception’. ‘Person cognition’ would be a better name, if it did not sound so pretentious.

For those who like definitions, person perception may be defined as the forming of judgements about other people, particularly those that concern people as social animals. However, the word ‘judgement’ is a little misleading because it suggests a careful, conscious weighing of the evidence, awareness of making a judgement, and awareness of what the judgement is; very often people would be unable to report all, or even any, of these three things. A better definition of person perception might take the form: ‘the ways people react and respond to others, in thought, feeling and action.’

This chapter will start by considering what sorts of things people say, think and feel about each other, to give some idea of the phenomena to be explained, and will then outline what appear to be the main issues and questions that have arisen.

Varieties of person perception

DIFFERING TIME SCALES

Our visitor bore every mark of being an average common-place British tradesman, obese, pompous and slow … there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red hair and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features.

Dr Watson’s thoughts in The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Many personal traits – sex, age, personality, intelligence, social class, mental and physical abilities – don’t alter much from day to day; others change on a time scale of weeks, days or hours. For example, moods, and the facial expressions that reveal them, usually last only a few hours, or even minutes, whereas the desire to continue speaking, and the cues by which the speaker conveys it, can change from second to second. Very few things about people never vary; even sex can be surgically altered. Enduring/changeable is a dimension in terms of real time scales, but tends to be a dichotomy for the perceiver. People are often surprised when they find that someone has visibly aged or got a new job, but not if his good temper has turned to bad.

The list of words for describing people’s moods or emotions is very long; some of those intensively studied by psychologists are: ‘anger, fear, happiness, disgust, contempt and pain.’ Many of these words are metaphorical or refer to the cause rather than the expression. What is the difference in terms of facial expression between embarrassment, chagrin, and shame? Probably not much – the difference lies elsewhere, in what caused the expression, or the observer’s opinion of its worthiness. Research has tended to look at expressed emotions in isolation, overlooking what or who caused the mood; compare ‘he is angry’ with ‘he is angry with Jones [not me] because Jones contradicted him’. Other changes cannot really be called moods or emotions, but are indications of the person’s attitude to what someone else has said or to what the person himself is saying. Liberman (1965) took some account of the complexities of real life when he studied tone of voice in a bored statement, a confidential communication, an objective question, a pompous statement, and expressing disbelief and doubt.

SUPERFICIAL AND DEEP DESCRIPTIONS

Mary is a girl friend back [home]. We went to school together for one year. She is about 5’6” and has red hair. She’s a lot of fun. She has a real good sense of humour; she’s fun to be with … She’s real smart …

[Ruth] dates fairly much but she can’t seem to go toward one boy and when she does like one boy she sort of falls hard and then if the boy doesn’t like her as much as she likes him, she has a real rough time … She’s worried all the time that a boy is going to drop her … She’s sort of insecure …

Two US College girls describing their best friends, from Secord and Backman (1964)

Many observations about other people are superficial: nationality, race, social class, occupation, age and physical appearance. Such observations aren’t particularly important in themselves, except that they often determine initial impressions and elicit stereotypes. Vernon (1964) points out that stereotypes based on superficial acquaintance can be very useful: ‘social intercourse would become chaotic if we did not straight away react differently to a sixty year old and a six year old, to a society hostess and a prostitute.’

Superficiality, like changeability, is a dimension rather than a dichotomy. An assessment of specific behaviour like ‘he always slams the door’ or ‘he plays football well’ goes deeper than mention of appearance, age or occupation, while a description of personality itself, expressed in such terms as ‘he is ill-mannered/sadistic/good at music’, goes still deeper. Accounting for people’s behaviour – ‘he drives very fast because he is aggressive’ – gives the appearance, if not always the actuality, of even deeper insight. Appropriately ‘depth psychology’ offers the most profound, or profound-looking, accounts of behaviour. A proposition like ‘he is ill-mannered because he is basically insecure and trying to boost his self-confidence’ not only describes the person’s behaviour, but explains it by reference to the interplay of processes below the surface of behaviour or, in the Freudian accounts, below the level of consciousness. Many critics have pointed out how hard it is to ascertain the truth of such statements.

Pseudo-profundity is of course the stock-in-trade of fortune-tellers, astrologers and some psychologists. An experiment by Snyder and Larson (1972) has shown how easily convinced most people are by a seemingly deep analysis of an individual’s character. The same set of platitudes, e.g. ‘disciplined and controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside’, was given to every student in a class, and most accepted it as a genuine and profound interpretation of their own personality. The experimenters dubbed this the ‘Barnum effect’, after the American circus proprietor who coined the phrase ‘there’s one [sucker] born every minute’. Secord’s unpublished study, described in Secord and Backman (1964), suggested the ‘depth’ of description of another’s personality may itself be a consistent personality difference. Some college students described friends in simple terms like ‘good at dancing, fun to be with’ whereas others offered elaborate psycho-dynamic accounts of people’s inner conflicts and complexes. This sort of investigation – other examples of which are discussed in Chapter 6 – suffers from the problem that subjects in psychology experiments tend to think profound psychological interpretations are what the experimenter wants, rather than the seemingly trivial and mundane things the subject actually thinks.

PERSONALITY TRAIT NAMES

abandoned	given up to vice, extremely wicked or sinning without restraint, irreclaimably wicked, as in an abandoned villain.
zoophilous	animal-loving.
	(The first and last words in Allport and Odbert’s (1936) list of 17,953 trait names, as defined by Webster’s New International Dictionary)

‘He will not be able to give me the correct change’ is a very specific prediction, whereas ‘he is bad at figures’ is more general, and ‘he is not very intelligent’ is about as general a statement as one could make. Words like ‘intelligent’, that say something about a whole range of behaviour, are called ‘trait words’. Some apply to a relatively limited area of behaviour – ‘fatherly’ or ‘ill-mannered’ – whereas others cover the whole of a person’s thoughts and actions – ‘extrovert’ or ‘quickwitted’. There are an enormous number of trait words in the English language – Allport and Odbert’s (1936) famous analysis, using Webster‘s New International Dictionary, listed nearly 18,000, some admittedly archaic, metaphorical or of marginal relevance. Psychologists have not been slow to add more to the list, and many have become popular terms, e.g. ‘inferiority complex’, ‘high need for achievement’ or ‘cyclothymic’.

The logical status of traits

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949) pointed out that trait words are ‘dispositional terms’; a dispositional statement like ‘glass is brittle’ or ‘Jones is stupid’ tells you what glass or Jones have done in the past, and are likely to do in the future, e.g. break if struck, give the wrong answer if asked a simple question. A trait word summarizes past behaviour and predicts future behaviour. The relationship between a trait statement and statements about particular events is often complicated. The statement ‘Jones is intelligent’ covers an enormous range of behaviour, from his skill at verbal reasoning to his taste in reading, but doesn’t defmitely imply any particular item. The statements ‘Jones is intelligent’ and ‘Jones can’t play chess’ aren’t contradictory; intelligent people are not perfectly and exhaustively consistent in their intelligence. The same is much more true of personality traits; sociable people are not invariably and on every occasion, sociable. Hence an exception to a dispositional statement about personality or intelligence doesn’t disprove it anymore than a single consistent example definitely proves it. (Curiously enough it has been shown recently that the ability to characterize someone’s personality, in trait terms, and the ability to predict what will happen on a particular occasion are separate, and to some extent opposed (Fancher, 1967). The better someone is at ‘summing someone up’ in a character sketch that others could use to identify the person described, the worse he is at translating this summary into a statement about what will actually happen on a particular occasion.)

The empirical status of traits

People are fairly consistently intelligent across different tasks; as Spearman first discovered; that is why it is possible to talk about ‘general ability’. The same is not true for many personality traits, where exceptions to the rule are often so numerous as to make the rule useless as a tool for predicting behaviour. The classic example is honesty, studied extensively in Hartshorne and May’s (1928) ‘Character Education Inquiry’. Hartshorne and May had the idea that ‘character’ – traits of honesty and persistence – could be measured like intelligence, and the tests used to select and train pupils. This proved impossible because the intercorrelations between the thirty or so tests used were uniformly very low. Not merely was there no correlation between tests of honesty in reporting money ‘found’ and tests of honesty in reporting athletic achievement, but even trivial variations in procedure resulted in tests failing to correlate, so that the tendency to crib from one answer book didn’t predict the tendency to crib from another. Similar results have been reported for other traits, such as dependency, conditionability, aggressiveness, and attitude to authority; the evidence is reviewed by Mischel (1968).

The usefulness of trait descriptions

Hartshorne and May’s findings imply that it is meaningless to say someone is honest unless the circumstances are specified. (Thus a character reference mentioning a shop assistant’s honesty would probably be taken as meaning honesty in handling money.) However, confusion arises when the person hearing an unqualified trait statement thinks it means one thing, while the person who made it meant something different. Oldfield (1939) asked a number of psychologists what they understood by ‘reliability’ and found that some thought it meant predictability – always doing the same thing – while others included the notion of consistently meeting obligations – always doing the right thing. Others again defined it more specifically, taking it to mean the ability to work without supervision, or even to mean refraining from saying things one would later regret. Given that the link between a trait description of someone and their actual behaviour is often so tenuous, it is not surprising to find that trait words are not always useful information. Rodin (1972) found they were much less useful as aids to identification than descriptions of specific characteristic behaviour, such as ‘apt to keep you talking for hours’. Trait descriptions were however more use than metaphorical descriptions; being told someone was ‘like a possum’ was no help at all in identifying them.

TRAITS AS EVALUATION

Mavole’s father must be that midget with the eyeglasses like milkbottle bottoms who enjoyed sweating so much.

Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

If something doesn’t really exist – and Hartshorne and May’s data seem to show that honesty doesn’t exist as a consistent behaviour pattern – why is there a word for it? Allport and Odbert (1936) argued that because trait words are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Problem: issues in person perception
• Part I Processes involved in perceiving other people
• Part II Sources of information in perceiving other people
• Part III Accuracy in perceiving other people
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index