Social Interaction 2 - Communication and Perception

Question 1

interpersonal gap

Answer 1

• All experience this on both sides - sender and receiver
  
  • Gap between what the sender intends to communicate and what the listener perceives (Gottman et al, 1979)
  • Sender:
  • Private knowledge on what they wish to convey
  • Encode into verbal and non-verbal actions
  • Get interference from the signal and how it is received
  • Potential interference (sender’s mood, social skills, distractions in environment)
  • Receiver:
  • Decode speaker’s actions
  • Potential interference
  • Interpretation (again private)

Question 2

Power of non-verbal communication

Answer 2

· Numerous different channels through which information can be transmitted (Hall, 2019)
- Eyes and gazing (eye contact)
- Body movements (e.g., hand gestures, posture)
- Paralanguage (e.g., pitch, volume) - Conveyed through the voice but not actual words
- Interpersonal distance

Question 3

example - facial expressions

Answer 3

· Do it naturally
· Convey mood and emotion
· Can be controlled:
- Intensify, minimise, neutralise
· But - hard to control, truth often leaks out (if only just for a half a second):
- Microexpressions (authentic flashes of our real emotions) (Yan et al, 2013)

Question 4

Verbal communication

Answer 4

· Vital part of communication
· Extensively involved in developing closeness

Question 5

Verbal communication - self-disclosure

Answer 5

· A lab experiment to generate closeness:
- Participants randomly paired up
- Answer fixed set of questions
· “Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest?”
· “If you could go back in your life and change any one experience, what would it be and why?”
· “36 questions that will make you fall in love with anyone”
· Revealing personal information to someone else generates closeness (Aron et al, 1997):
- We tend to like people who disclose personal information to us
- And we also like people more after we have disclosed

Question 6

Verbal communication - self-disclosure 2

Answer 6

· Aron’s 36 questions to generate closeness (also called “fast-friends procedure”) often used and replicated, e.g., Sprecher, 2021:
- Participants in closeness generation task felt closer than those engaging in small-talk or unstructured getting-acquainted task.
- Mode of communication (face-to-face vs video-chat) didn’t matter.

Question 7

Verbal communication - self-disclosure 3

Answer 7

· Disclosure can be “too much too soon” - patience and turn taking (Buck and Plant, 2011; Sprecher and Treger, 2015)
· Communication is a two-way street
· Closeness develops based on:
1. Meaningful disclosure
2. Other responds with interest and empathy
3. Other perceived as responsive to what the sender is conveying

Question 8

Responsiveness

Answer 8

· Attentive and supportive recognition of one person’s needs and interests by another
· What\s really important is the perceived partners responsiveness - they need to give these signals
· Perceived partner responsiveness:
- Feeling understood
- Feeling valued, respected, and validated
- Feeling cared for
· Basis of secure, well-functioning, and highly satisfying relationships - e.g., friendship, romantic relationships, work colleagues

Question 9

communication - conclusion

Answer 9

· Much of our communication is non-verbal, harder to control
- We can easily get close to others when we self-disclose, reveal more of ourselves and others revealing more to us.

Question 10

interpersonal gap 2

Answer 10

· How accurate are we typically in “reading” other people’s experiences, intentions, behaviours?:
- “Moderately” accurate (r = .32; Nater and Zell, 2015) - gap is pretty big, with most times we are aware of, but sometimes we are not
- Room for interpretation (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974)
· How do we arrive at interpretations of others and how do our perceptions affect relationships?

Question 11

Perceptions and related social cognitive processes

Answer 11

· Affected by the attributions we make
· Positive illusions - seeing through rose-coloured glasses
· Individual differences in relationship beliefs

Question 12

Attributions

Answer 12

· Attributions - explanations we use to understand each other’s behaviour
· Internal - cause is due to the person
· External - cause is due to something else

Question 13

Relationship attributions

Answer 13

· Sometimes your partners are good to you, and sometimes they aren’t
· How do you explain good vs bad behaviour?
· How do these attributions influence the way you feel?

Question 14

Explaining good behaviour:

Answer 14

· Your partner brings you a box of chocolates for no particular reason.
· Internal attribution: S/he always knows just what to get me – s/he is so thoughtful!
· External attribution: S/he got them from someone at work today and is just re-gifting them to me.

Question 15

Explaining bad behaviour:

Answer 15

· Your partner snaps at you for being 5 minutes late.
· Internal attribution: S/he is such an impatient and irritable person.
· External attribution: S/he must have had a really hard day at work.

Question 16

attributions 2

Answer 16

· Satisfaction influences attributions of partners’ behavior (Weiss, 1980; Walsh & Neff, 2020)
- Satisfied people make internal attributions for partners’ good behaviour, external for partners’ bad behaviour
- Unsatisfied people make external attributions for partners’ good behaviour, internal for partners’ bad behaviour
· And…
· Those attributions also affect satisfaction (Bradbury & Fincham, 1990; Osterhout et al., 2011)
- People who make internal attributions for partners’ good behaviour, external attributions for partners’ bad behaviour become happier. (Relationship enhancing)
- People who make external attributions for partners’ good behaviour, internal attributions for partners’ bad behaviour become more unhappy. (Distress maintaining)

Question 17

positive illusions

Answer 17

· Emphasise partners’ positive qualities, minimise faults (Murray and Holmes, 1999)
· Judge partners more favourably than they judge themselves (Gignac and Zajenkowski, 2019)
· Advantages of positive illusions:
- Related to increased relationship satisfaction and stability
- Give benefit of the doubt
- Minimises conflict
- Partner feels good and more secure
· Partner fulfilling prophecy -> our partners may “live up” to our idealised image of them (Murray and Holmes, 1999)

Question 18

Positive illusions - are positive illusions always beneficial?:

Answer 18

· Depends on how unrealisatic illusions are
· Minor illusions smooth social interaction, major illusions minimise problems
· Partner’s may feel pressure to ‘live up to ideals’

Question 19

Positive illusions vs self-verification:

Answer 19

· In what situations are positive illusions more beneficial than self-verification?
- When relationships are “new (e.g., dating or newly married couples) (Fletcher, 2015)
· In what situations is self-verification more beneficial for relationships than positive illusions?
- Longer term relationships – feeling understood
- When it is related to aspects of self-concept that very important (Swann et al., 1992)

Question 20

Relationship beliefs:

Answer 20

· Beliefs - ideas or theories about what the world is like
· Statement #1:
- Relationships that do not start off well will inevitably fail
· Statement #2:
- A successful relationship evolves through hard work and resolution of incompatibilities
· Destiny beliefs - people are either compatible or they are not
· Growth beliefs - relationship challenges can be overcome

Question 21

Relationship outcomes of destiny beliefs:

Answer 21

· People with destiny beliefs are initially happier with their relationships
- But when faced with conflict, satisfaction declines
· Especially sensitive to signs that their relationship is “not meant to be”
· Disengage from the relationship when there is a problem

Question 22

Relationship outcomes of growth beliefs:

Answer 22

· People with growth beliefs are constructive, optimistic, and committed in the face of conflicts
· Fewer one-night stands, dating a partner for a longer period of time
· Try to maintain the relationship when there is a problem

Question 23

destiny vs growth beliefs

Answer 23

· Beliefs about how relationships should operate
· Destiny beliefs can be associated with lower satisfaction when couples face challenges.
· Growth beliefs tend to be associated with more satisfaction overall because they may help couples work through challenges

Question 24

communication and perception

Answer 24

· Power of self-disclosure in generating closeness
· Power of perceptions, attributions, and beliefs in shaping interactions and relationships
· Interpersonal gap: can we close it?

Question 25

narrowing the gap

Answer 25

· Expect others to read our minds (Wright & Roloff, 2015)
· Don’t realize how bad we can be at reading people’s minds:
- Studies on romantic partners and college roommates showed that as relationships progressed, accuracy did not increase, but (over)confidence did (Swann & Gill, 1997)
- Need for communication

Question 26

“Solving the (real) other minds problem”:

Answer 26

· “Egocentric simulations” (aka “projection”)
· How we interpret others is mostly driven by how we ourselves would think, feel, and behave—what would motivate us, how we would feel in a situation, and how we would react.
· How to narrow the gap?
- Time, effort, perspective taking (but still top-down biases that colour perceptions)
- Actively encode information
- Construe oneself at higher level of abstraction (see ourselves as we see others)