Acting, behaving, and the selfless basis of metaperception.

The desire to create a particular impression of oneself to others is a fundamental interpersonal motive that should be followed by an assessment of the success of the self-presentation. The authors integrate the areas of self-presentation and metaperception in the present research by assigning participants to enact roles during 2 dyadic interactions and measuring the actors' metaperceptions and their partners' trait judgments. They found a high level of accuracy in actors' metaperceptions but no accuracy in partners' trait judgments of the actors. Instead, partners' trait judgments corresponded closely to the actors' interpersonal behavior, indicating that there was little or no "personality leakage" in the actors' behavior. Random assignment to role created a situation in which private self was uncorrelated with public self. Results indicate that actors were able to disregard their self-concepts when determining the impressions they created. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceiving groups accurately.

This study bridges a gap between traditional group perception research and person perception research by relating group members' perceptions of others to their perceptions of the group's functioning. Ratings of ability, responsibility for a group task, and liking of others were gathered from college students completing group assignments. Group members were able to accurately perceive other group members along task relevant ratings. A social relations model analysis further revealed that individuals' liking of specific others did not impact the accuracy of their judgments of others' abilities or of the group's functioning as a whole. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metacognition of emotional face recognition.

While humans are adept at recognizing emotional states conveyed by facial expressions, the current literature suggests that they lack accurate metacognitions about their performance in this domain. This finding comes from global trait-based questionnaires that assess the extent to which an individual perceives him or herself as empathic, as compared to other people. Those who rate themselves as empathically accurate are no better than others at recognizing emotions. Metacognition of emotion recognition can also be assessed using relative measures that evaluate how well a person thinks s/he has understood the emotion in a particular facial display as compared to other displays. While this is the most common method of metacognitive assessment of people's judgments of learning or their feelings of knowing, this kind of metacognition—“relative meta-accuracy”—has not been studied within the domain of emotion. As well as asking for global metacognitive judgments, we asked people to provide relative, trial-by-trial prospective and retrospective judgments concerning whether they would be right or wrong in recognizing the expressions conveyed in particular facial displays. Our question was: Do people know when they will be correct in knowing what expression is conveyed, and do they know when they do not know? Although we, like others, found that global meta-accuracy was unpredictive of performance, relative meta-accuracy, given by the correlation between participants' trial-by-trial metacognitive judgments and performance on each item, were highly accurate both on the Mind in the Eyes task (Experiment 1) and on the Ekman Emotional Expression Multimorph task (in Experiment 2). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The looking-glass self in family context: A social relations analysis.

Family relationships provide the most valid context for studying a key hypothesis of Symbolic Interaction Theory (SIT), that how one is perceived by significant others determines one's view of the self (C. H. Cooley, 1902). Implicit in this hypothesis is another hypothesis, that people are accurate in perceiving how they are perceived by others. This study investigated the accuracy of young people's perceptions of how they are viewed by their parents (i.e., metaperception accuracy). Social relations analysis (D. A. Kenny & L. La Voie, 1984) was applied to data from 51 2-parent, 2-child families. College students were accurate in their metaperceptions of father but only for perceived assertiveness. Adolescents demonstrated generalized accuracy in their metaperceptions of cooperation. The results partially support a modified version of SIT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metaperceptions of bias in intimate relationships.

Meta-awareness of bias in intimate partner judgments was investigated in 3 studies. In Study 1, participants rated fictional partners in happier relationships as more positively biased in their partner perceptions. In Study 2, participants thought their judgments of their own current partners were positively biased and that they were judged by their partners in a positively biased fashion. Using a sample of couples, Study 3 showed that metaperceptions of bias were anchored to actual levels of bias at the individual and relationship levels. In addition, positive bias was accentuated for traits that were more relevant to mate evaluation. These findings (as expected) suggest that positive bias in partner judgments can be a normative and consciously accessible feature of intimate relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Brotherly love II: A developmental perspective on liking, love, and closeness in the fraternal dyad.

This research examined the nature of closeness, liking, and love among 59 dyads of full biological, nontwin adult brothers and the correlations of these variables with age. Five dimensions of relational development were measured and used in stepwise regressions to determine what predicted closeness, liking, and love in these fraternal dyads. It was expected that love would be predicted by expressive relational qualities, such as self-disclosure, whereas closeness and liking would be predicted by more instrumental qualities, such as commitment or interdependence. These predictions were generally supported. Moreover, liking and love were shown to remain relatively constant over time, whereas closeness decreased as brothers grew older. Comparisons with other male–male relationships were also made, and implications for the research and therapeutic setting are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do we know how much people like one another?

Metaperception is a person's perception about a second person's perception of a third person. The purpose of this article is to examine the accuracy of metaperceptions of liking. A related question concerns whether the heuristics of balance, reciprocity, and agreement are used by perceivers when forming such judgments. The authors present analyses from 5 diverse research studies that used an adaptation of the social relations model for triads (C.E. Bond et al, in press). The results indicate that people know how much people like one another, even with small amounts of information. Although there is evidence for the use of heuristics, particularly reciprocity and agreement, accuracy is sometimes enhanced by using these heuristics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal perception in a social context.

Interpersonal perception among well-acquainted individuals in a social context was studied. High acquaintance was expected to provide perceivers with a large sample of target behaviors across situations. In turn, memory for acquaintances should be organized by social group and personality characteristics, as predicted by the social context-personality index theory. Differentiation of the target's traits in memory should produce a target effect on perception that is stronger than the perceiver effect. Furthermore, evidence for accuracy, meta-accuracy, independence of self- and other-perception, and reciprocity of affect were anticipated. A social relations analysis of data from a multiple-interaction, reciprocal design was used to study these phenomena. At the individual level, analyses indicated that perceptions of targets were determined primarily by target characteristics and secondarily by perceiver construction of the judgment. Also, perceivers judged targets as targets judged themselves, and targets knew in general how perceivers viewed them. Self- and other-perceptions were largely independent. Surprisingly, we did not observe dyadic meta-accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal perception of the AIDS risk potential of persons of the opposite sex.

Individuals engage in high rates of AIDS risk behavior, despite awareness that infection is preventable, and use biased decision rules for determining the AIDS risk potential of their own and others' behavior. In this laboratory study, 32 male and 32 female university students made judgments of the AIDS risk potential of persons of the opposite sex following exposure to explicit information regarding AIDS-related attitudes and behavior in a discussion group. A social relations analysis showed that judgments of AIDS risk potential were determined by perceiver-based assimilation that was stronger than target-based consensus for both men and women. Further, perceptions of others were related to self-perception. However, the consensus that was observed showed moderate accuracy. Implications for AIDS prevention are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Who knows what about a person? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model.

This article tests a new model for predicting which aspects of personality are best judged by the self and which are best judged by others. Previous research suggests an asymmetry in the accuracy of personality judgments: Some aspects of personality are known better to the self than others and vice versa. According to the self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model presented here, the self should be more accurate than others for traits low in observability (e.g., neuroticism), whereas others should be more accurate than the self for traits high in evaluativeness (e.g., intellect). In the present study, 165 participants provided self-ratings and were rated by 4 friends and up to 4 strangers in a round-robin design. Participants then completed a battery of behavioral tests from which criterion measures were derived. Consistent with SOKA model predictions, the self was the best judge of neuroticism-related traits, friends were the best judges of intellect-related traits, and people of all perspectives were equally good at judging extraversion-related traits. The theoretical and practical value of articulating this asymmetry is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social reference points and accessibility of trait-related information in self-other similarity judgments.

Two experiments examined latencies of self-other similarity judgments. The judgments were obtained for traits for which self was prototypical, other was prototypical or neither was prototypical. Two question types used were as follows: self-as-referent questions ("How similar is X to you…?") and other-as-referent questions ("How similar are you to X…?"). Judgments were faster for self-prototypical traits than for neither-prototypical traits regardless of the question form. Judgments for other-prototypical traits were faster than judgments for neither-prototypical traits in the case of the other-as-referent questions, but not in the case of self-as-referent questions. Results support the notion that both self and representations of specific others serve as habitual reference points. However, they also suggest that, compared to other social prototypes, self is a more rigid reference point, which is not easily affected by linguistic factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of an encounter group experience on self-perception and interpersonal relations.

Conducted a controlled laboratory investigation of an encounter group experience involving 24 Ss. All Ss 1st participated in a group discussion and rated each other and self on liking, trust, openness, and relaxation. A week later, 1/2 of the Ss participated in a 2-day group encounter and, subsequently, all Ss met again in discussion and were rerated on the same values by each other, self, and independent Os. Results show the encounter Ss improved in self concept, intragroup cohesiveness and liking, and ability to relate to others. No such changes were found for the controls. Negatively, however, the Os did not find any difference between experimental Ss and controls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression, social comparison, and the false-consensus effect.

Refers to the fact that in general, people perceive high consensus for their own attributes—the "false-consensus effect." 20 depressed and 20 nondepressed undergraduates (10 men and 10 women in each group) were asked about the extent to which depression-relevant and depression-irrelevant attributes were true of themselves and true of the "average college student." Ss were also asked questions assessing the accuracy of their perceptions of others. Depressed Ss showed less false consensus than nondepressed Ss. Although depressives characterized themselves as dissimilar to others, they showed no consistent bias to deprecate themselves relative to others. Nondepressives consistently enhanced themselves relative to others, although the magnitude of their self–other differences was smaller than that of depressives. The tendency to deprecate oneself relative to others on negative depression-relevant items was a better predictor of severity of depression than self-perceptions or other perceptions alone. Findings regarding the accuracy of perceptions of others were mixed. The discussion includes implications for the false-consensus effect, depressive attributional style, nondepressive self-serving biases, and therapy for depression. (1? p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A social relations analysis of agreement in liking judgments.

Using a round-robin design in which every subject served both as judge and target, subjects made liking judgments, trait ratings, and physical attractiveness ratings of each other on each of 4 days. Although there was some agreement in the liking judgments, most of the variance was due to idiosyncratic preferences for different targets. Differences in evaluations were due to at least 2 factors: disagreements in how targets were perceived (is this person honest?) and disagreements in how to weight the trait attributes that predicted liking (is honesty more important than friendliness?) When evaluating the targets in specific roles (as a study partner), judgments showed much greater agreement, as did the weights of the trait attributes. A 2nd study confirmed the differential weighting of trait attributes when rating liking in general and the increased agreement when rating specific roles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

So close, and yet so far: Does collectivism foster transparency overestimation?

The present research demonstrated that horizontal collectivism (HC), the tendency to emphasize social bonds and interdependence, is associated with overestimating the extent to which one's preferences, feelings, and behavioral inclinations are transparent to close others. The link between HC and felt transparency was mediated by self-other merging but was not significantly mediated by perceived similarity, behavioral closeness, or metaperception positivity. Evidence of a causal connection was obtained in an experiment where individuals for whom interdependence was primed exhibited greater transparency overestimation than did those for whom it was not. Additional results indicated that higher HC is associated with greater confidence but not greater accuracy in judgments about a friend. The authors argue that other perspective-taking deficits involving overuse of the self in judgments of others should also be exacerbated by the self-other merging that is associated with HC. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Being accepted for who we are: Evidence that social validation of the intrinsic self reduces general defensiveness.

Three studies examined the possibility that being liked intrinsically by others—for who one is—reduces self-esteem defense, whereas being liked for what one has achieved does not. All 3 studies contrasted the effects on self-esteem defense of liking based on intrinsic or achievement-related aspects of self. Study 1 showed that thoughts of being liked intrinsically reduced defensive bias toward downward social comparison. Study 2 demonstrated that being liked for intrinsic aspects of self reduced participants' tendency to defensively distance themselves from a negatively portrayed other. Study 3 revealed that being liked for intrinsic aspects of self encouraged a preference for upward over downward counterfactuals for a negative event. In all 3 studies, similar reductions in defensiveness were not found when liking was based on achievements. Discussion focuses on implications for understanding the functional value of different bases of self-worth. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of multiple social categories on stereotyping.

Examined the cognitive processes underlying stereotyping, and the effects of multiple social categories in impression formation. 60 Canadian students (aged 17–29 yrs) assessed the stereotypes of men, women, 20 or 70 yr olds, and French or English Canadians. Ss were then introduced to 8 target individuals representing combinations of gender, age and ethnicity, followed by a memory test. Stereotype judgments were relatively more automatic than nonstereotype judgments. Individuals tended to be perceived in terms of their gender and age; this effect was more pronounced on stereotype traits than on the nonstereotype ones. Memory was found to be better for age and gender than for ethnicity, and the speed for making such judgments followed the same pattern. Results support the view that individuals are perceived in terms of stereotypes and suggest that certain salient characteristics will be more influential in a particular context. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)