Social norm perception in groups with outliers.

Abstract

Social outliers draw a lot of attention from those inside and outside their group and yet little is known about their impact on perceptions of their group as a whole. The present studies examine how outliers influence observers' summary perceptions of a group's behavior and inferences about the group's descriptive and prescriptive norms. Across four studies (N = 1739) we examine how observers perceive descriptive and prescriptive social norms in groups containing outliers of varying degrees. We find consistent evidence that observers overweight outlying behavior when judging the descriptive and prescriptive norms, but overweight outliers less as they become more extreme, especially in perceptions of the prescriptive norm. We find this pattern across norms pertaining to punctuality (Studies 1-2, 4) and clothing formality (Study 3) and for outliers who are both prescriptively and descriptively deviant (e.g. late arrivers), as well as for outliers who are only descriptive deviants (e.g. early arrivers). We further demonstrate that observers' perceptions of the group shift in the direction of moderate outliers.

The Crowd-Emotion-Amplification Effect

“…In addition, a test of how different emotional distributions affect amplification is also important. For example, recent work suggests that people tend to both discount (Haberman & Whitney, 2010) and overweight (Dannals & Miller, 2017) outliers, depending on their degree of extremity. Whether strong emotional outliers increase or decrease amplification remains unclear.…”

Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: An empirical test in Nigeria

“…Studies suggest that this is possible in part because people overgeneralize from the public behavior of role models to their perception of the overall community norm ( 20 , 21 ). Role models who influence norm perceptions can be people in one’s community who are high status ( 22 , 23 ), who receive lots of attention ( 20 ), and, in some cases, who break with tradition ( 24 ). However, people can even use fictional characters as role models, such as characters in a soap opera ( 25 ).…”

Integration and segmentation conflict during ensemble coding of shape.

“…Similar operations can be performed for simple features like orientation (Alvarez & Oliva, 2009; Elias, Padama, & Sweeny, 2018; Parkes, Lund, Angelucci, Solomon, & Morgan, 2001; Ross & Burr, 2008) velocity and trajectory (Watamaniuk & Duchon, 1992; Watamaniuk, Sekuler, & Williams, 1989), hue (Maule & Franklin, 2015; Webster, Kay, & Webster, 2014), as well as for high-level visual features like facial expression (Elias, Dyer, & Sweeny, 2017; Haberman, Harp, & Whitney, 2009; Haberman & Whitney, 2007, 2009; Im et al, 2017), gaze (Florey, Clifford, Dakin, & Mareschal, 2016; Sweeny & Whitney, 2014), biological motion (Sweeny, Haroz, & Whitney, 2013), identity (de Fockert & Wolfenstein, 2009; Neumann, Schweinberger, & Burton, 2013; Yamanashi Leib, Landau, Baek, Chong, & Robertson, 2012), viewpoints (Yamanashi Leib et al, 2014), and attractiveness (Walker & Vul, 2014). More complex judgments of race, dominance, social norms, and even group membership itself appear to be rooted in ensemble coding, too (Dannals & Miller, 2017; Goldenberg, Sweeny, Shpigel, & Gross, 2020; Lamer, Sweeny, Dyer, & Weisbuch, 2018; Phillips, Slepian, & Hughes, 2018). Summary judgments even appear possible for more abstract targets, like average lifelikeness of plants, nonhuman animals, and household objects (Yamanashi Leib, Kosovicheva, & Whitney, 2016).…”