Social Psychology

1
Social Psychology

• Lecture 4
• Person Perception Deception
• Jane Clarbour
• Room PS/BOO7 email jc129 Tel [phone]

2
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

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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

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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

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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?

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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)

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Inaccuracy in person perceptionSelf-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

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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

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Tests of Person Perception

• Dates back to 1920s
• 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?

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

• A measure of peoples accuracy in the perception
  of non-verbal cues.
• a 45-min bw 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

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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.

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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

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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 peoples
  performance.
• But, if NV cues are part of innate, unlearned
  responses to particular events
• then inter-observer agreement may be totally
  irrelevant

14
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 plt.0001)

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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

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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

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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

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Objective tests (1)

• LA RUSSO (1978) Tested the clinical assumption
  that paranoid schizophrenics have special
  sensitivity to NVC
• both groups saw 2 videos of peoples facial
  expressions as watched 2 lights in 2 conditions
• Condition 1 encoders facial expression after
  actually receiving electric shock after red
  light, but no shock after white light
• Condition 2 encoders posed expression after
  both lights

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2 x 2 Between Ss design

• Half Ss saw posed encodings
• Other half saw spontaneous encodings

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

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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!)

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

• The SIT was given to students in 2 conditions
• Transcription of verbal content
• 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.

22
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 Qs with scores on 5
  dimensions.
• Status (6 scenes)
• Intimacy (6 scenes)
• Kinship (6 scenes)
• Competition (6 scenes)
• Deception (6 scenes)

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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 peers 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.

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Other studies using IPT

• 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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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