Determinants of social perception in a naturalistic setting

Monson, Thomas C.; Tanke, Elizabeth Decker; Lund, Jerry

doi:10.1016/0092-6566(80)90044-6

Cited by 40 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Raters will try to make "reasonable" (i.e., stereotypic) guesses in the absence of real behavioral information. But as we mentioned earlier, their ratings increasingly converge as they actually observe the person's behavior (e.g., Funder & Colvin, 1987;Monson, Tanke, &Lund, 1980;Moskowitz & Schwarz, 1982;Norman & Goldberg, 1966;Passini & Norman, 1966).…”

Section: Hypothesis 4: Agreement Is Due To Stereotypes Based On Obviomentioning

confidence: 85%

Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate.

Kenrick¹,

Funder²

1988

American Psychologist

819

499

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For the past two decades the person-situation debate has dominated personality psychology and had important repercussions in clinical, social, and organizational psychology. This controversy strikes to the heart of each of these disciplines because it puts on trial the central assumption that internal dispositions have an important influence on behavior. According to emerging views of scientific progress, controversy serves the useful function of narrowing the field of competing hypotheses. In this light, we examine seven hypotheses that arose during the course of the person-situation debate, ranging from most to least pessimistic about the existence of consensual, discriminative personality traits. The accumulated evidence fails to support the hypotheses that personality traits are simply (a) in the eye of the beholder, (b) semantic illusions, (c) artifacts of base-rate accuracy, (d) artifacts of shared stereotypes, (e) due to discussion between observers (who ignore behavior in favor of verbal self-presentation or reputation), or (f) mere by-products of situational consistencies. Evidence also fails to support the hypothesis (g) that although traits are related to behavior, the relationship is too small to be important. Yet we have not simply come full circle to a reacceptance of traits as they were understood 20 years ago. Research generated by these hypotheses has allowed us to better specify the circumstances under which personality assessments will be valid.Whether we are acting as professional psychologists, as academic psychologists, or simply as lay psychologists engaging in everyday gossip, the assumption that people have "traits" (or enduring cross-situational consistencies in their behavior) provides a basis for many of our decisions. When a clinical or counseling psychologist uses a standard assessment battery, he or she assumes that there is some degree of trait-like consistency in pathological behavior to be measured. When an organizational psychologist designs a personnel selection procedure, he or she assumes that consistent individual differences between the applicants are there to be found. When an academic psychologist teaches a course in personality, he or she must either assume some consistency in behavior or else face a bit of existential absurdity for at least three hours a week. Likewise, a good portion of our courses on clinical and developmental psychology would be unimaginable unless we assumed some cross-situational consistency.Even in everyday lay psychology, our attempts to analyze the behaviors of our friends, relatives, and co-workers are riddled with assumptions about personality traits.Despite the wide appeal of the trait assumption, personality psychologists have been entangled for some time in a debate about whether it might be based more on illusion than reality (e.g., Alker

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Section: Hypothesis 4: Agreement Is Due To Stereotypes Based On Obviomentioning

confidence: 85%

Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate.

Kenrick¹,

Funder²

1988

American Psychologist

819

499

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Otherwise, such correlations tend to be on the order of .30 to .60 (see, e.g., Cheek, 1982;also Andersen, 1984;Edwards &Klockars, 1981;Funder, 1980;Funder & Dobroth, in press;Goldberg, Norman, & Schwartz, 1980;Hase & Goldberg, 1967;McCrae, 1982;Monson, Tanke, & Lund, 1980;Paunonen & Jackson, 1985;Woodruffe, 1985). Moreover, at least four different studies have independently verified the additional fact that such correlations are higher when the person in question describes him-or herself as consistent on the trait being evaluated, versus as variable on that dimension (Bern & Allen, 1974;J.…”

Section: Correlations Between Self-judgments and Others' Judgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgment.

Funder¹

1987

Psychological Bulletin

799

461

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research on "error" in social judgment has largely supplanted research that addresses accuracy issues more directly. Moreover, this research attracts a great deal of attention because of what many take to be its dismal implications for the accuracy of human social reasoning. These implications are illusory, however, because an error is not the same thing as a "mistake." An error is a judgment of an experimental stimulus that departs from a model of the judgment process. If this model is normative, then the error can be said to represent an incorrect judgment. A mistake, by contrast, is an incorrect judgment of a real-world stimulus and therefore more difficult to determine. Although errors can be highly informative about the process of judgment in general, they are not necessarily relevant to the content or accuracy of particular judgments, because errors in a laboratory may not be mistakes with respect to a broader, more realistic frame of reference and the processes that produce such errors might lead to correct decisions and adaptive outcomes in real life. Several examples are described in this article. Accuracy issues cannot be addressed by research that concentrates on demonstrating error in relation to artificial stimuli, but only by research that uses external, realistic criteria for accuracy. These criteria might include the degree to which judgments agree with each other and yield valid predictions of behavior. The accuracy of human social judgment is a topic of obvious interest and importance. It is only natural to wonder to what degree the judgments we make of the personalities of ourselves and others might be right or wrong, and to desire to improve our accuracy. Nonpsychologists are often surprised and disappointed, therefore, when they begin to take psychology courses and discover that the field has largely foresworn interest in the accuracy issue. The discipline's early, direct interest in accuracy (e.g., Estes, 1938; Taft, 1955; Vernon, 1933) was all but completely stifled some years ago by the publication of a series of methodological critiques by Cronbach (1955), Hastorf and Bender (1952), and others. As a result, according to one authoritative textbook: The accuracy issue has all but faded from view in recent years, at least for personality judgments. There is not much present interest in questions about whether people are accurate... . There is, in short, almost no concern with normative questions of accuracy. On the other hand, in recent years there has been a renewed interest in how, why, and in what circumstances people are inaccurate. (Schneider, Hastorf, & Ellsworth, 1979, p. 224; see also Cook, 1984)' Specifically, the psychology of social judgment has been dominated in recent years by a flood of research on the subject of "error." Studies of error appear in the literature at a prodigious rate, are disproportionately likely to be cited (Christensen-Sza

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“…Furthermore, it should be pointed out that because subjects who took part in the trait categorization task were not exactly comparable with those doing the trait rating task it is possible that some of the effects may have been diluted. The non-significant results obtained in relation to the second hypothesis make it impossible to support the resul ts of Nisbett et al (1973) or their cri tics (Taylor & Koivumaki, 1976;Monson, Tanke & Lund, 1980). It must be noted that the methodology of this experiment was different from the others in that subjects were asked to account for the stability of the manifestation of traits over four specific situations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…However, Taylor and Koivumaki (1976) and Monson, Tanke, and Lund (1980) failed to replicate Nisbett et al's (1973) findings and pointed out a number of methodological errors in the latter's work. Thus it seems reasonable to suggest that subjects would in certain circumstances attribute less stability to traits attributed to themselves and more to others, though of course this depends on the nature of the trai ts .…”

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confidence: 98%

Attributions of stability and relevance of personality traits

Furnham

Endler

1982

Current Psychological Research

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This experiment tested a number of hypotheses derived from trait theory, attribution theory and interactional psychology. Forty subjects rated the stability and relevance of 60 pre-selected traits of three role-related people and themselves in four specific social situations. The traits were categorized beforehand in terms of their structural, motivational and content properties, and whether they were positive or negative. There was a significant difference in the perceived stability of positive and negative traits between liked and disliked people; positive traits being seen as significantly more stable in liked people and less stable in disliked people. However, subjects did not attribute significantly less stability to their own behavioural traits than to those of others in the same situations. It was also demonstrated that trait labels are seen to be differentially relevant for describing people in different social situations. The results are discussed in terms of the work on stability and cross-situational consistency in trait and attribution theory and person-situation research.

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Determinants of social perception in a naturalistic setting

Cited by 40 publications

References 28 publications

Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate.

Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate.

Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgment.

Attributions of stability and relevance of personality traits

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