L17 - Being Perceived by Others

Question 1

What is expressive accuracy?

what informs the way others perceive us?

Answer 1

an individual’s ability to accurately express their thoughts, emotions, and/or personality
- in order to be perceived accurately by others, you need to give other people accurate cues to read

Question 2

How is expressive accuracy studied?

Answer 2

everyone completes a Big Five personality inventory
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion/introversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism

Question 3

What are the benefits to being more accurately expressive?

Answer 3

people who express their personalities more accurately:
- have better psychological adjustment
- have higher levels of well-being
- are less sensitive to social threat
- have better marital satisfaction
- are more dominant
- have higher social status
- are more feminine/socialized to follow women’s gender roles

Question 4

Is expressive accuracy stable in individual difference?

Answer 4

expressive accuracy is a stable individual difference: some people’s personalities are habitually perceived more or less accurately than others

there is more variability in targets’ ability to accurately express their personalities than in perceivers’ ability to accurately read targets’ personalities

Question 5

Describe Mignault et al.’s “Just be yourself” study (2022).

Answer 5

Ps completed Big Five Personality Inventory

Video interview
- Ps randomly assinged to be told to “just be yourself” or not
- answered questions such as “what are your passions,” “what do you do in your leisure time”

Observer Ratings
- rated Ps’ personalities + how “observable” each trait was

Results:
- being told “just be yourself” increased expressive accuracy, particularly for highly observable personality traits

Question 6

What are factors that lead someone to display their personality more accurately?

Answer 6

when people are told to “just be themselves”, they actually do display their personalities more accurately

individuals who were raised in a more expressive family environment have better expressive accuracy

Question 7

How effectively can people control their self-presentations?

Answer 7

“When people are deliberately trying to convey an impression of a state that they are not really experiencing, their nonverbal behaviours convey that state to others even more clearly and effectively than when they are experiencing the state but are not trying to purposefully communicate it to others” (DePaulo, 1992)

Question 8

Why might someone not express themselves accurately?

Answer 8

Display Rules: social norms that guide the appropriateness of displaying certain emotions
- typically, people avoid displaying negative emotions in consideration of others’ thoughts/feelings

Question 9

Describe Ally’s research on emotional expressive accuracy and empathic accuracy in friendships.

is the friend’s ability to competently navigate the supportive interaction due to the target’s expressive accuracy or the perceiver’s empathic accuracy?

Answer 9

a large group of perceivers is going to infer the emotions of each participant (target)

participant is expressively accurate if everyone can accurately infer their emotions

participant is not expressively accurate if no one can figure out how they feel

Question 10

How does the way others perceive us guide our sense of self?

Answer 10

meta-perception: a person’s perception of what others think of them
- requires making inferences based on incomplete/ambiguous cues

Question 11

How accurate are people’s meta-perceptions?

Answer 11

individuals can judge how people in general view them with reasonable accuracy

but they overestimate the uniformity of others’ views because they cannot accurately distinguish the perspectives of specific other people

Question 12

What influences meta-perception accuracy?

Answer 12

Self-enhancement bias: most people over-estimate the positivity of others’ perceptions

“Looking through the looking glass darkly”: some people tend to be pessimistic about other’s perceptions of them

Question 13

Describe Moritz & Roberts’ study on self-esteem and meta-perception accuracy.

Answer 13

Ps engaged in a “getting to know you” social interaction with another person
- Big Five Personality Inventory (their actual personality)
- rated their partner’s personality
- rated how they thought their partner would rate them (meta-perception)

depression scale
Self-esteem scale

Results:
- Ps with lower self-esteem believed that their interaction partners viewed them as less conscientious, less agreeable, and more neurotic
- Ps with more depression symptoms believed that their interaction partners viewed them as less conscientious, less agreeable, and more neurotic

Question 14

What is the self-fulfilling prophecy?

how does the way others perceive us guide our behaviour?

Answer 14

receiving information about others’ expectations causes people to behave in line with those expectations

this theory stems from research on student achievement in schools:
- teachers hold expectations about their students
- teachers treat students differently depending on their expectations
- students react to the differential treatment in a way that confirms the teacher’s expectations

Question 15

Describe Rosenthal & Jacobsen’s Pygmalion study (1965).

Answer 15

elementary school teachers were told that some students in their class were “growth spurters” based on a “Harvard intelligence test”

in reality, the test did not exist, and the students who were labelled “growth spurters” were chosen at random

measured academic achievement (IQ) at the beginning and end of the school year

Results:
- first and second graders in the experimental group (the “growth spurters”) gained significantly more IQ points compared to the children in the control group

Question 16

Did the Pygmalion study generate any criticism?

Answer 16

yes

it might not be ethical to deceive teachers into giving some students preferential treatment

many researchers have failed to replicate this finding

teacher’s expectations tend to be reasonably accurate and based on teacher’s knowledge about student performance

it is more likely for teachers’ low expectations of studnets to negatively influence their achievement than for teachers’ high expectations to positively influence student achievement

Question 17

What are some more recent support for self-fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 17

mothers’ false beliefs about their adolescents’ educational outcomes influenced adolescents’ post-secondary educational attainment

nurses’ expectations about patients’ rehabilitation outcomes influenced their recovery

Question 18

What is stereotype threat?

Answer 18

the fear of confirming negative stereotypes of one’s group often undermines one’s performance, thus confirms the stereotype

Question 19

Why might the fear of confirming negative stereotypes hinder performance?

Answer 19

they are under extra pressure to succeed

they may take actions to protect their self-worth that hinder their achievement (e.g., avoiding practice)

they might be primed to behave in line with the stereotype

Question 20

Describe Spencer et al.’s stereotype threat study (1999).

Answer 20

researchers created two math tests of equal difficulty

Ps were told “as you may know, there has been some controversy about whether there are gender differences in math ability. Previous research has somtimes showen gender differences, and somtimes shown no gender differences. Yet little of this research has been carried out with women and men who are very good in math. You were selected for this experiment because of your strong background in mathematics”

Ps were told that one test was shown to produce gender differences, and the other test was shown not to produce gender differences

Results:
- women only performed worse on the test that they were told was shown to produce gender differences
- researchers suggest this is because their fear of confirming the negative stereotype undermined their ability

Question 21

What is the Michelangelo effect?

Answer 21

close relationship partners shift each other’s behaviour and self-appraisals toward desired ideals

Question 22

Describe the Michelangelo effect study shown in class

Answer 22

Followed heterosexual romantic couples over a semester, at 3 time points they measured:
- their beliefs about their partners’ percetion of them
- their partners’ behaviours that affirmed those beliefs
- the characteristics of their ideal self
- their movement toward their ideal self

effect observed: P perceives their partner to have beliefs that are congruent with their ideal self –> partner is perceived to behave toward P in a manner that is congruent with their ideal self –> P experiences greater movement toward their ideal self