This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and

Transcription

1 This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier s archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit:

2 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: FlashReports Person perception by active versus passive perceivers Ashley S. Waggoner, Eliot R. Smith *, Elizabeth C. Collins Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, United States article info abstract Article history: Received 24 March 2009 Revised 21 April 2009 Available online 5 May 2009 Keywords: Person perception Social cognition Person perception research is dominated by studies of passive perceivers who exert no control over the information they receive. In contrast, perceivers in everyday life can often actively choose the type and quantity of information they receive. In this study, active and yoked passive perceivers formed impressions of individuals based on information from Facebook. Compared to active perceivers, passive perceivers reported greater confidence and ease in their judgments. Passive perceivers exhibited greater confidence (though not greater accuracy) with increased information, but active perceivers did not show this effect, placing a boundary condition on past research. Passive perceivers also liked targets more than active perceivers, a finding that is not explained by valence-dependant sampling by active participants, or by misattribution of fluency or greater sensitivity among passive participants. These provocative findings highlight the need to account for active and interactive processes in person perception rather than continuing to focus on passive perceivers. Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Person perception has almost always been studied by giving participants preselected information about target individuals (photos, videos, or written behavior descriptions) as a basis for forming impressions. In contrast to such passive perceivers, perceivers in everyday life are more often active, free to choose the type and amount of information they receive about a person as a basis for their judgments (Smith & Collins, 2009). For example, to form an impression of a newly prominent political candidate you may turn to her Wikipedia page, selectively viewing those items that are most important to you (government service, issue positions), until you feel you have an adequate impression. How might such reallife active impression formation differ from the conclusions drawn from studying passive perceivers who receive preselected information about social targets? Active processes in person perception Unlike passive perceivers, active perceivers control the information they receive. Increased control may generate increased judgmental confidence, just as people who select their own lottery tickets overestimate their chances of winning (Langer, 1975). Control may also make the judgment process subjectively easier for active perceivers, as they are able to view precisely the information they want, rather than having to rely on whatever information they are given. * Corresponding author. address: esmith4@indiana.edu (E.R. Smith). Compared to passive perceivers, active perceivers should also exhibit a different relationship between confidence and the amount of information viewed. Active perceivers should keep viewing information until they reach a subjective threshold of confidence in their judgments (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989). Thus, their confidence should be relatively uniform no matter how many items they view. For passive perceivers, research has shown that confidence increases, and judgments become easier, as more information is viewed about a target (Gill, Swann, & Silvera, 1998). Their greater control may also affect how much active perceivers like targets, and opposing predictions are possible. First, if control leads to greater judgmental ease, this fluency may be misattributed as liking (Winkielman, Schwarz, & Nowak, 2002), resulting in active perceivers liking targets more than passive perceivers. Alternatively, active perceivers may sample additional information only to the extent that they like the target, a process that would create a negativity bias in their impressions (Denrell, 2005; Smith & Collins, 2009). If an impression is negative the perceiver may stop sampling and never see potentially corrective information. But if an impression is positive, the perceiver may sample further (possibly encountering more negative information). Passive perceivers, not subject to this negative bias, would end up liking targets more. It is unclear whether this process will occur in situations that involve reading about, rather than interacting with, a disliked target, as the former may not be terribly aversive. If it occurs, valence-dependent sampling would be evidenced by a strong positive correlation for active perceivers between liking and the amount of information viewed. Active and passive perceivers differing only in control but receiving exactly the same information should exhibit comparable /$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi: /j.jesp

3 A.S. Waggoner et al. / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) accuracy in their judgments. Although there is no prior research in the area of person perception, Keehner, Hegarty, Cohen, Khooshabeh, and Montello (2008) found that perceivers who could actively manipulate a novel 3D object on a computer were no more accurate in learning its shape than passive perceivers who saw the same screen displays but were unable to manipulate them. Study overview We yoked passive perceivers to active perceivers and compared their impressions of targets based on information from Facebook. This is not only a convenient source of stimuli but is also ecologically valid, important in everyday person perception. Social networking websites are increasingly popular, and undergraduates view Facebook as useful for gathering information about friends and strangers (Westerman, Van Der Heide, Klein, & Walther, 2007). Impressions formed via Facebook also correlate with impressions formed during real life interaction (Weisbuch, Ivcevic, & Ambady, 2009). Active participants chose which components of a targets Facebook profile to view, and decided when to stop viewing information and provide their impression. Passive participants saw the same items chosen by their yoked active perceiver before providing their impression. Perceivers judged the targets on several broad dimensions: the Big Five personality dimensions, political ideology, and degree of religiosity. Based on previous research, we expected that participants would be more accurate in their ratings of extraversion compared to the other Big Five traits (Gosling, Gaddis, & Vazire, 2007). We also expected participants to be fairly accurate in judging targets political and religious views, as many cues to these characteristics could be present (e.g., a pro-life Facebook group, music preferences, interests that include church functions ). Participants also indicated their judgmental confidence and ease and their liking for the targets; hypotheses for these variables were outlined above. Methods Participants Three hundred Indiana University undergraduates (178 female) participated for experimental credit. Participants assigned to the passive condition were randomly yoked to an active participant, creating 150 active passive pairs. Three pairs were discarded due to problems with data collection, leaving 147 pairs. Targets and stimuli The targets were volunteers recruited from the Indiana Network on Facebook via an online advertisement. They consented to allow research use of their Facebook profiles, and completed questionnaires in exchange for a chance to win a $50 prize. We selected 30 profiles for this study and divided each into 15 separate pieces of information: About me (an open-ended self-description), activities, books, current status, groups, interests, movies, music, number of friends, number of photos, number of status updates, number of wallposts, profile picture, quotes, and TV shows. All individually identifying information (except the profile picture) was removed. These 30 profiles were divided into three sets of 10, and each active participant was randomly assigned to one of these sets. Procedure After providing informed consent, participants completed the study in individual cubicles. Instructions familiarized participants with the types of information available for each target. Active participants were then told that they would see a menu of these information items for each target. They would be able to view as many or as few of the items as they wished (with a minimum of one item), in any order, before providing their impression of the target. Passive participants were told that they would see items whose number and order would vary from target to target, before providing their impression. After providing demographic information participants began with their first target. Active participants viewed up to ten targets (the session was terminated after an hour). Passive participants viewed the same targets and items, in the same order, as their yoked active participant. Both passive and active perceivers were allowed to view each item for as long as they wished (restricting passive perceivers to the same viewing time as their yoked actives would have introduced a confound, with actives being self-paced while passives faced time limits). For each target, participants filled out the measures described below. After rating all targets, participants were debriefed, thanked, and dismissed. Measures Big Five The Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness) were measured using the Ten Item Personality Inventory (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003). Targets rated themselves on the same inventory. Politics and religion Participants estimated each target s political ideology on a scale from 1 (strongly conservative) to 7(strongly liberal) with the midpoint (4) labeled moderate, middle of the road. Participants also rated how important they felt religion was to the target on a scale from 1 (extremely important) to 4(not at all important). The targets also completed these items. Other ratings On 1 7 scales, participants indicated how confident they were in their judgments of the target (extremely unconfident to extremely confident), how easy it was for them to form their impression (extremely difficult to extremely easy), how much they liked the target (strongly dislike to strongly like), and how similar they were to the target (extremely dissimilar to extremely similar). No differences were predicted or found on the similarity measure, which will not be mentioned further. Results Items viewed Participants viewed a mean of 8.08 items (sd = 4.04) out of 15. About Me was by far the most often chosen item (viewed by 87.4% of participants) and was usually viewed first (average rank order of 1.36). Pictures (83.5%), interests (69.6%), and activities (68.0%) were the next most frequently viewed. The least popular items such as number of status changes and number of wall postings were viewed by around 25%. Accuracy Our analyses of accuracy followed Gosling et al. (2007). Mean ratings of each profile were calculated for active and passive participants, and correlated (across the 30 profiles) with the self-reports provided by the targets. As seen in Table 1, participants in both conditions were accurate on ratings of extraversion, political ideology, and religiosity. Accuracy was nonsignificant on the other personality dimensions. These results parallel those from Gosling et al.

4 1030 A.S. Waggoner et al. / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) Table 1 Correlation across profiles (N = 30) of target self-reports with aggregated participant ratings. (2007), who also found impression accuracy based on Facebook profiles highest on extraversion and lowest on neuroticism. As expected, accuracy differed little between the active and passive participants. Across the 7 judgment dimensions, the accuracy correlations averaged.15 for actives and.20 for passives. The similar levels of accuracy reflect the fact that in all cases, aggregated ratings by the active and passive participants were highly correlated. The lowest correlation was.79 for neuroticism, with most in the.90 range (.97 for extraversion). Judgmental confidence and ease Active participants Passive participants Political affiliation.55 c.61 c Religiosity.37 a.40 a Extraversion.51 b.45 a Agreeableness Conscientiousness Openness Neuroticism a b c p<.05. p<.01. p<.001. Paired t-tests revealed significant differences between active and passive participants in judgmental confidence, t(1381) = 2.53, p <.02, d =.14, and ease, t(1381) = 3.87, p <.001, d =.21. These effect sizes are small, but the analyses have good power because the unit of analysis is a participant pair s responses to a single profile. Contrary to our expectation, passive perceivers were more confident (passive M = 4.76, active M = 4.61), and found impression formation easier (passive M = 4.74, active M = 4.51). Why were passive participants more confident? This finding is explained by the relationship between confidence and the number of items viewed. For active participants, who could keep sampling until they attain a subjective threshold of confidence before providing their ratings, we expected this relationship to be flat. However, for passive participants a positive relationship was expected (Gill et al., 1998). As shown in Fig. 1, this is what we found. In a hierarchical linear model analysis, number of items viewed has virtually no relationship to confidence for active perceivers (b =.014, p =.31), but a positive relationship for passive perceivers (b =.051, p <.001), and the difference between these two slopes is highly significant (p <.001). The graph shows how the passive perceivers end up having a higher level of confidence overall since about eight items were viewed on average. Fig. 1. Relationship between confidence and the number of items viewed for active and passive perceivers. The same pattern held for ease of judgment. Number of items viewed is unrelated to ease for active perceivers (b =.024, p <.09), but has a significant positive relationship for passive perceivers (b =.049, p <.001), and the difference between these two slopes is highly significant (p <.001). Liking Paired t-tests revealed a significant difference between active and passive participants, t(1381) = 2.42, p <.02, d =.13, with passive perceivers (M = 4.22) liking the targets more than active perceivers (M = 4.09). Liking was not significantly related to the number of items viewed for either type of perceiver. Three potential explanations for the liking difference can be ruled out by the data. First, valence-dependent sampling (Denrell, 2005) can create a negativity bias for active but not passive perceivers. However, this process would generate a strong positive relationship between liking and amount of information viewed for active perceivers; the absence of that relationship renders this explanation untenable. Second, passive perceivers (not actives as we expected) could have misattributed their judgmental fluency (confidence and ease) as liking. However, the difference in liking between the actives and passives is not mediated by either ease or confidence: The difference persists (mean difference reduced to.11, p <.04, from the original.13) when ease and confidence are statistically controlled. Third, passive perceivers (without the additional cognitive load of choosing information) might be more sensitive to the actual likability of the profile, liking the best profiles more and the worst profiles less than the active subjects. If most profiles were relatively positive, this pattern could result in greater mean liking by passive perceivers. However, the active passive difference in liking was essentially constant across the range of profile likability (means from 2.92 to 4.95 on the 1 7 scale). Discussion This study compared active perceivers who (like social perceivers in everyday life) chose the quantity and type of information they received, to passive perceivers who (like those in most person perception research) received identical information without any choice. As expected, active and passive perceivers were equally accurate, paralleling findings on object perception by Keehner et al. (2008). However, the two types of perceivers differed in important and sometimes unexpected ways. Confidence, ease, and amount of information As in past research (Gill et al., 1998), passive perceivers became more confident (though not more accurate) as they viewed more items. Active participants did not show this relationship, highlighting an important boundary condition on past conclusions. Perhaps their role in actively selecting the information made them more aware that later-viewed items (e.g., number of wallposts) were often less diagnostic than those viewed early (e.g., About Me). Most notable is the finding that above about six items viewed, passive perceivers were more confident than active (Fig. 1). A possible explanation is that passive perceivers, not knowing how many items they would receive for any target, tried to construct an impression as early as possible based on very few items. Further items would then be interpreted as confirming that impression (an assimilation effect; Jones, Goethals, Kennington, & Severance, 1972), increasing confidence. Active perceivers would feel less pressure to form an impression early since they could view as much information as they like. They would more likely use later items to fine-tune their impression rather than interpreting them as confirming an already-formed impression.

5 A.S. Waggoner et al. / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) Confidence-accuracy calibration Passive perceivers were more confident but no more accurate than active perceivers, implying either that active participants are underconfident in their judgments, or passive perceivers are overconfident. This difference is noteworthy, as confidence has important implications for behavior toward a target or for influence over others attitudes toward a target. The confidence difference also suggests that the impressions passive perceivers form (e.g., in a person perception study) may be more resistant to change than impressions formed by active perceivers (e.g., in daily life), a difference that would have intriguing implications. Liking Passive perceivers liked the targets more than active perceivers. This difference is not explained by valence-dependent sampling on the part of active participants, nor by passive participants misattribution of fluency or greater judgmental sensitivity. Although currently unexplained, the finding suggests that previous research on person perception using passive perceivers may have obtained unrepresentatively positive impressions. Conclusion Although person perception in actual interaction may differ from both, comparing active and passive person perception leads to the surprising conclusion that people may be more confident in their impressions, and like the target more, if they receive prepackaged rather than freely chosen information. These results not only have important theoretical implications, but also provide initial insights into the active processes that are part of impression formation in daily life. These findings highlight the need for theory and research to take account of active and interactive processes in person perception (Smith & Collins, 2009) rather than continuing to focus on passive perceivers. Acknowledgement This work was supported by NSF Grant BCS References Chaiken, S., Liberman, A., & Eagly, A. H. (1989). Heuristic and systematic information processing within and beyond the persuasion context. In J. Uleman & J. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp ). New York: Guilford. Denrell, J. (2005). Why most people disapprove of me: Experience sampling in impression formation. Psychological Review, 112, Gill, M. J., Swann, W. B., Jr., & Silvera, D. H. (1998). On the genesis of confidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, Gosling, S. D., Gaddis, S., Vazire, S. (2007). Personality impressions based on Facebook profiles. In Paper presented at the international conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO. Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., & Swann, W. B., Jr., (2003). A very brief measure of the Big Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, Jones, E. E., Goethals, G. R., Kennington, G. E., & Severance, L. J. (1972). Primacy and assimilation in the attribution process: The stable entity proposition. Journal of Personality, 40, Keehner, M., Hegarty, M., Cohen, C., Khooshabeh, P., & Montello, D. R. (2008). Spatial reasoning with external visualizations: What matters is what you see, not whether you interact. Cognitive Science, 32, Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, Smith, E. R., & Collins, E. C. (2009). Contextualizing person perception: Distributed social cognition. Psychological Review, 116, Weisbuch, M., Ivcevic, Z., & Ambady, N. (2009). On being liked on the web and in the real world : Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Westerman, D., Van Der Heide, B., Klein, C. A., & Walther, J. B. (2007). How do people really seek information about others? Information seeking across Internet and traditional channels. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N., & Nowak, A. (2002). Affect and processing dynamics: Perceptual fluency enhances evaluations. In S. C. Moore & M. Oaksford (Eds.), Advances in consciousness research (44, pp ). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.