Social Psychology
Lecture 4:
Person Perception & Deception
Jane 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 selffulfilling 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 selfratings 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 validity
IPT (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 9point 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 nonverbal 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 nonverbal 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 multiplechoice 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