This research examined the role of personality, nonverbal skills, and gender as moderators of judging and being judged accurately in zero-acquaintance situations. Unacquainted participants, assembled in groups, completed a battery of personality tests, took 2 audiovisual tests (the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity [ PONS ] and the Interpersonal Perception Task [ IPT ]) intended to assess decoding skills and then rated themselves and every other person in the group on a set of personality dimensions. Results indicated that more sociable and extraverted participants tended to be more legible, that is, were judged more accurately. Participants who were more accurate judges tended to be less sociable and performed better on tests of decoding accuracy. Performance on the PONS predicted accuracy of judgment for men, whereas performance on the IPT predicted accuracy of judgment for women. On the whole, results suggest that some important and theoretically relevant moderators of accuracy in the zero-acquaintance situation have been identified.Many decisions in our everyday lives are based on judgments arising from minimal interaction. For example, we often decide whom we are going to hire, whom we will approach for directions when we are lost, or whom we will sit next to on a long train ride, on the basis of minimal interaction. Such decisions have considerable and consequential influences on our social outcomes: We might have to cope with an irascible, unpleasant colleague at faculty meetings; we might be rudely rebuffed or misdirected by the person we approach for directions; or we might have to suffer a long, tedious train ride accompanied by a loquacious companion. And, in turn, (unpleasant though it might be to admit this) we are judged by others as potential colleagues, guides, or traveling companions on the basis of superficial interactions or even distant visual and auditory perceptions.Fortunately for us, recent research indicates that we are able to make fairly accurate judgments of other people on the basis of minimal interactions or even mere glimpses of them (Albright,

In this research the authors examined the accuracy of judging sexual orientation on the basis of brief observations or "thin slices" of nonverbal behavior. In Study 1, sexual orientation was judged more accurately than chance, with judgments being more accurate when based on dynamic nonverbal behavior (10-s and 1-s silent video segments) than on static information (a series of 8 still photographs). Gay men and lesbians were more accurate than heterosexuals in judging still photographs and 1-s clips but not in 10-s clips. In Study 2, judgments based on 10-s dynamic figural outline displays containing primarily gestural information were more accurate than chance.

Several lines of experimental research have shown that attributional styles are affected by the attributor's culture, inferential goals, and level of cognitive processing. Can these findings be replicated in natural settings? This study compared the attributions made in two domains (sports articles and editorials) of newspapers published in two culturally distinct countries (Hong Kong and the United States). Consistent with the cross-cultural research, attributions were less dispositional in the East than in the West. This cultural difference was weaker in editorials than in sports articles. The authors argue that the higher level of complexity, accountability, and uncertainty in editorials increased the cognitive effort expended to make attributions, which, in turn, attenuated their extremity. Implications for the mixed model of social inference are discussed.

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Little is known about the conditions that lead observers to adopt different inferential goals in the context of their everyday lives. Four studies examined whether future expectations created situational inferential goals. In 2 quasiexperimental studies, students made more situational inferences for targets in their expected future careers. In 2 experiments, situational expectations were manipulated, and participants made more situational inferences when they expected to be in the same situation as the target. This tendency was stronger when observers devoted minimal cognitive effort to their inferences, suggesting that when observers have situational expectations, making situational inferences is less effortful than making dispositional inferences.