Contextual Effects In Impression Formation

Author : Yuan Jun Xie
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (135 download)

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Download or read book Mind, Mien, Milieu written by Yuan Jun Xie and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "People readily form impressions of each other (e.g., friendly, dangerous) based on facial appearance. Regardless of accuracy, these impressions are powerfully influential: predicting who we hire, promote, elect to office, and convict in court. A substantial research effort has focused on understanding how impressions are formed. Modern approaches emphasize how target characteristics (e.g., facial cues, social category) and perceiver characteristics (e.g., motivation, cognition) jointly guide impressions. Yet empirical research on the role that context plays in impression formation is scarce. Critically, the field lacks a systematic understanding of how contexts interact with perceiver and target factors to shape impressions, which contexts matter, and to what extent. This dissertation leverages new computational and statistical methods to (1) quantitatively characterize which contexts matter for impression formation, and (2) investigate how the structure of facial impressions ("face-trait space") shifts across contexts. The first study (Chapter 2) examines how stereotypes shape impressions of faces across social groups. We found that societal representations of facial impressions map onto the structure of societal stereotypes-shifting across racial and gender categories in similar ways. We also demonstrate this effect for perceivers' own unique, learned associations about these groups. Both cultural learning and personal experiences may shape the structure of facial impressions, suggesting that the race and gender of targets contextualize, and constrain, the impression formation process: merely categorizing a face provides context for impressions. Chapter 3 extends this work, testing whether perceivers from different countries form impressions differently. Stereotypes about social categories are shaped by cultural products (e.g., knowledge of societal inequalities) and may vary across countries. We operationalized this aspect of cultural context using national indices of gender inequality, as a "ground truth" measure of gender-related outcomes. We found racial and gender differences in the face-trait space across 41 countries, but national indices of gender inequality did not consistently explain these differences. Chapter 4 explores how much day-to-day contexts (experienced by people in the real world) matter in facial impressions. Using experience-sampling to track daily changes in people's experienced contexts (e.g., mood, environment, physiology, psychological situation) while they formed impressions, we adopted a rigorous statistical approach to quantify the contributions of perceiver, target, and contexts to facial impressions. Overall, we found no evidence that these daily contexts matter for shaping facial impressions. Finally, Chapter 5 tests how situational affordances shift the face-trait space. Situational goals may constrain impression formation (Hypothesis 1), causing perceivers to attend to goal-relevant traits-which then shape impressions on less relevant traits (Hypothesis 2). Somewhat consistent with our hypothesis, the face-trait space became more constrained in contexts where fundamental motives were made salient (e.g., mate-seeking, disease avoidance) compared to a neutral context. However, more research is needed to understand how situationally relevant traits influence downstream impressions on other traits. Together, this work shows that facial impressions are guided by perceiver, target, and contextual factors. Stereotype associations and situational affordances are important, shaping the structure of facial impressions-whereas day-to-day, real-world contexts play only a minimal role. This dissertation (1) quantitatively disentangles perceiver, target, and context influences on impressions, and (2) tests changes to the structural representation of impressions. Overall, a socially contextualized theory of perception can fundamentally broaden our understanding of how humans perceive other humans"--