Social Perception and Stereotyping: An Interpersonal and Intercultural Approach

Social perception and stereotyping have been important issues in social and cross-cultural psychology for most of the 20th century. After briefly reviewing its history, the current article discusses social perception and stereotyping from the interpersonal and the cross-cultural perspective. Specifically, these issues are presented along a dimension ranging from intraindividual, to intragroup, to intergroup perception. First, the discussion of interpersonal perception emphasizes social perception in a face-to-face context. Though this section may appear to be technical and complicated to some readers, this level of detail is necessary to elaborate a most basic version of the componential approach to interpersonal perception. Second, the section on social stereotypes discusses social identity theory and the ingroup and outgroup homogeneity effects. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of lingering concerns in research on social perception and stereotypes.     

Accuracy and Confidence on the Interpersonal Perception Task: A Japanese-American Comparison

This study compared the accuracy and confidence of Japanese and American participants on the Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT-15). The IPT contains 15 brief, real-life scenes on videotape for which there are objectively correct answers about relationships and deception. A total of 344 participants were run in a 2 (Japanese vs. American participants) × 2 (Audiovisual vs. Visual-Only presentation) × 2 (Sex of participant) design. Support was found for the hypothesized greater accuracy of Americans over Japanese, but a Culture × Presentation Modality interaction qualified the main effect of culture. Specifically, Japanese and American participants had virtually identical scores on the IPT-15 in the Visual-Only condition, but Americans' scores increased while Japanese scores decreased in the Audiovisual condition. Analyses of the confidence measures indicated that American participants were much more confident than the Japanese participants, but this difference was larger in the Audiovisual condition than in the Visual-Only condition. In addition, the prediction that women would be more accurate on the IPT, but still report lower confidence than men, was also supported. Finally, Japanese participants with moderate proficiency in spoken English were more accurate on the IPT than those with low English proficiency. The likely processes underlying these differences and the possible directions for future research are discussed.     

Perception of Teacher Sexual Misconduct by Age of Student

ABSTRACT

This study explored whether student age influenced perceptions of teacher sexual misconduct. Participants (300 undergraduates) read scenarios depicting teacher sexual misconduct in which the student's age was varied (9, 12, 15), and then answered questions about their perceptions. Data were analyzed with 2 (respondent gender) × 2 (cross-gender dyads) × 3 (student age) MANOVAs. Experiences involving the youngest student were viewed as the most abusive, followed by the 12-year-old, and the 15-year-old. Gender differences were evident, with women viewing the experiences more negatively. Scenarios involving a male teacher/female student were viewed more negatively than a female teacher/male student dyad. These findings illustrate the importance of educating students and school personnel about teacher sexual misconduct.     

Distance and Conversation

Whenever faces are engaged in a face-to-face conversation distance is evoked between them as a “common dialogic space” that both connects and separates. This space must be dealt with in conversation. The habitual tendency is to cover it up by formulating a topic that is external to the immediate relation. Keeping the topic going “holds” the separate parties together in an ongoing engagement. When the topic for some reason fails to hold, the gap between the participants is exposed and they fall embarrassedly into silence. There are, however, ways to give presence to distance and still contain it within the bounds of the conversation. What this calls for is a recognition of the other as Other and of the speaking voice as an emergent self rather than an utterance subordinate to the external topic. A discussion of the phenomenon of distance from the perspectives of speaker and hearer is followed by an examination of its effects on the seriousness of the conversation.     

Long‐Term Memory for an Emotional Interpersonal Interaction Occurring at 5 Months of Age

We examined infants' long‐term retention of a single unique emotional experience into early childhood. Twenty‐month‐olds who had participated in a still‐face procedure at 5 months (experience group) fixated the face of the person who had instigated the still face significantly less than the faces of 2 other novel persons. Control 20‐month‐olds (no‐experience group) looked longer overall and fixated the target person equally or more than the 2 novel persons. In short, children who interacted with a stranger in the laboratory under both natural and anomalous social conditions just once when they were infants apparently retained a specific memory of that person and the experience into toddlerhood.     

Meta-Analyses of the Intra- and Interpersonal Outcomes of Interpersonal Coordination

Interpersonal coordination, the extent to which social partners coordinate each other’s postures and mannerisms, acts as a “social glue” that serves both individual and social goals, such as producing prosocial behaviors and facilitating harmonious interactions. Research in this area has become prominent in a variety of domains both within and outside of psychology, forming a sizeable literature dedicated to investigating the causes and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We conducted a series of meta-analyses on studies that treated interpersonal coordination as an independent variable, in order to measure its effect on several intrapersonal (e.g., mood, need to belong) and interpersonal (e.g., prosocial behavior) outcomes, as well as several potential moderators (e.g., percentage of female participants) that may affect the strength of the effect. Overall, the results demonstrated that the positive effects of interpersonal coordination are robust, with a few exceptions specific to intrapersonal outcomes. These findings provide a much-needed quantitative summary of the literature on interpersonal coordination, and highlight areas that merit future research.     

Changes in the Ability to Detect Ordinal Numerical Relationships Between 9 and 11 Months of Age

When are the precursors of ordinal numerical knowledge first evident in infancy? Brannon (2002) argued that by 11 months of age, infants possess the ability to appreciate the greater than and less than relations between numerical values but that this ability experiences a sudden onset between 9 and 11 months of age. Here we present 5 experiments that explore the changes that take place between 9 and 11 months of age in infants' ability to detect reversals in the ordinal direction of a sequence of arrays. In Experiment 1, we replicate the finding that 11‐ but not 9‐month‐old infants detect a numerical ordinal reversal. In Experiment 2 we rule out an alternative hypothesis that 11‐month‐old infants attended to changes in the absolute numerosity of the first stimulus in the sequence rather than a reversal in ordinal direction. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate that 9‐month‐old infants are not aided by additional exposure to each numerosity stimulus in a sequence. In Experiment 4 we find that 11‐month‐old but not 9‐month‐old infants succeed at detecting the reversal in a nonnumerical size or area‐based rule, casting doubt on Brannon's prior claim that what develops between 9 and 11 months of age is a specifically numerical ability. In Experiment 5 we demonstrate that 9‐month‐old infants are capable of detecting a reversal in ordinal direction but only when there are multiple converging cues to ordinality. Collectively these data indicate that at 11 months of age infants can represent ordinal relations that are based on number, size, or cumulative area, whereas at 9 months of age infants are unable to use any of these dimensions in isolation but instead require a confluence of cues.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.     

Gender and Temporality in Interpersonal Systems

This essay provides a nonessentializing account of how gender affects the social construction of time in communicative interactions. Niklas Luhmann's systems theory serves as the theoretical framework for explaining how time is constructed through communication codes. Using Luhmann's model, the essay argues that gender is a communication code that operates to align social participants' perspectives towards a socially constructed “present.” However, the essay notes that participants' experience of that present will be contingent upon the specific cultural and historical criteria that constitute their use of the gender code. The criteria specific to Anglo-American culture are used to illustrate how this instanciation of the gender code might affect temporal experience.     

Deviance,Rule-Breaking and Male Dominance in Conversation

Previous research on dyadic interaction indicates that cross-sex conversations (male-female) are characterized by more frequent interruptions than same-sex conversations. More specifically, males consistently tend to interrupt their female co-conversationalists. Survey data from three student samples suggest that normative definitions reflected in perceptions of interruption are inconsistent with the empirical distribution of rule-breaking observed by conversational researchers. These results provide some strategic insights into the problematic distinction between deviance and rule-breaking that has been central to labeling theory.     

Interpersonal Relations in Endgame

Endgame of Samuel Beckett, is one of the most important games in the Theater of the Absurd. This paper, by analyzing the interpersonal relations in this play, aims to appreciate its absurd feature.     

Home Environment,But Not Socioeconomic Status,is Linked to Differences in Early Phonetic Perception Ability

Infants perceptually tune to the phonemes of their native languages in the first year of life, thereby losing the ability to discriminate non‐native phonemes. Infants who perceptually tune earlier have been shown to develop stronger language skills later in childhood. We hypothesized that socioeconomic disparities, which have been associated with differences in the quality and quantity of language in the home, would contribute to individual differences in phonetic discrimination. Seventy‐five infants were assessed on measures of phonetic discrimination at 9 months, on the quality of the home environment at 15 months, and on language abilities at both ages. Phonetic discrimination did not vary according to socioeconomic status (SES), but was significantly associated with the quality of the home environment. This association persisted when controlling for 9‐month expressive language abilities, rendering it less likely that infants with better expressive language skills were simply engendering higher quality home interactions. This suggests that infants from linguistically richer home environments may be more tuned to their native language and therefore less able to discriminate non‐native contrasts at 9 months relative to infants whose home environments are less responsive. These findings indicate that home language environments may be more critical than SES in contributing to early language perception, with possible implications for language development more broadly.     

Cultural Similarities and Differences in Emblematic Gestures

Despite longstanding interest in cultural differences in emblems, there have only been a few systematic investigations of those differences, and to date there is no study that catalogues and compares emblems across different cultural groups to a standard list of verbal messages. This study does so. Encoders from six world regions produced potential emblems from a standard verbal message list. Gestures that were encoded by at least 70% of the encoders in a region were shown to observers from the same regions, and gestures that were judged correctly as the message intended by at least 70% of the decoders in that region were considered emblems. These procedures resulted in the cataloguing of cultural differences in emblems to the same verbal message list. Surprisingly, the results also indicated a small group of emblems that were similarly encoded and decoded across cultures.     

Maupassant and Chekhov: Similarities

It has long been known that the Ukrainian historian and political leader Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi was for a time associated with Freemasonry. This paper and document describe that association and provide evidence that his type of Masonry was marked by a commitment to both liberal democracy and ethno-cultural tolerance and acceptance, particularly with regard to Jews.     

Interpersonal Distances in Group Walking

The spatial organization of 1,020 groups comprised of adolescents and young adults, observed in an ecological setting while walking, was analyzed. Observations were made in an urban environment where walking speed could be considered. The results showed that male dyads and triads tended to walk abreast less often than female dyads. Mixed dyads walked abreast more often than same-sex dyads; and the males preceded the females in two-thirds of the cases. The male groups walked at a higher rate of speed than the female groups. Walking speed was correlated to misalignment between group members when walking. The most frequent spatial arrangement in triads was a “<” formation (as seen from above, while the walking direction was from left to right), with the middle individual positioned slightly behind in comparison to the lateral individuals. Groups comprised of more than three individuals tended to split themselves into single individuals, dyads, and triads.     

Interpersonal Communication and News Comprehension

This study examines the role of interpersonal and mass mediachannels in public awareness and comprehension of major newsstories. Unlike previous research which asks about respondentperceptions of their "main source" for news, this study attemptsto determine actual comprehension of stories that had been inthe news during the previous week. On the basis of two separateprobability samples, respondent awareness and comprehensionof a week's news was measured and related to demographic, newsmedia use, and interpersonal discussions variables. A MultipleClassification Analysis of the data indicates that conversationabout the news is a major and often overlooked correlate ofcomprehension, and that interpersonal channels may play at leastas important a role in the public's awareness and understandingof the news as exposure to the news media.     

Interpersonal Reasons for Interpersonal Perceptions: Gender-incongruent Purpose Goals and Nonverbal Judgment Accuracy

Women’s tendency to outperform men on measures of accuracy in interpreting the meaning of nonverbal behavior might be due to such measures being more congruent with women’s interpersonal goals than men’s. The present study examined undergraduate men’s and women’s (N = 41) nonverbal judgment accuracy on the Interpersonal Perception Task-15 (IPT-15; Costanzo & Archer, 1993 [.The interpersonal perception task-15 (IPT-15). Berkeley: University of California Center for Media and Independent Learning) when the purpose for using their judgment skills was manipulated to be either congruent or incongruent with stereotypic “masculine” and “feminine” interpersonal goals. Results showed that each gender was at a relative disadvantage in judgment accuracy in the gender-incongruent goal conditions: women were relatively less accurate when they thought the IPT-15 measured judgment skills of use to interrogators in the military, whereas men were relatively less accurate when they thought the IPT-15 measured judgment skills of use to social workers in the social services. Discussion centers on the importance of matching individuals’ interpersonal goals to the purpose goals of the measure when using measures of interpersonal sensitivity.