Do Perceiver Effects in Interpersonal Perception Predict Cooperation in Social Dilemmas?

Abstract

People's general tendencies to view others as cold-hearted and manipulative (rather than affectionate and trustworthy) may explain defection in social dilemma situations. To capture idiosyncratic tendencies in other-perceptions, we collected mutual judgments in groups of unacquainted individuals in two studies (N 1 = 83, N 2 = 413) and extracted perceiver effect scores using the Social Relations Model. In both studies, participants later played a public goods game. In Study 1, perceiver effects predicted cooperation beyond self-reported and group-related control variables. However, results were not replicated in a preregistered second study with higher power and a more diverse sample. We discuss implicit group norms as a likely explanation for the inconsistent findings and suggest future directions for addressing generalized expectations in social dilemmas.

Positivity in peer perceptions over time: Personality explains variation at zero-acquaintance, popularity explains differential change.

“…This differential linear development accounted for 12 to 21% of the variance in perceiver effects over time, which is quite substantial given that earlier work has mostly conceptualized perceiver effects as a stable construct and because only 5 to 16% of the variance remained unexplained (i.e., was due to mood swings or measurement error) after accounting for stable differences and linear change. Taken together with past work (e.g., Rau et al, 2020;Srivastava et al, 2010;Wood et al, 2010), these findings suggest that people not only differ in how positively they tend to see others' personalities but also in terms of how their perceptions change in early acquaintanceship.…”

“…Herein, we will focus on the studies’ aspects directly relevant for the current research question. Detailed study descriptions including all additional aspects such as a comprehensive explanation of all measures and procedures have been documented elsewhere (Study A: Rau et al, 2020; Study B: Kraft et al, 2021; Study C: Geukes et al, 2019). Parts of the data have been used in previous publications but none of them concerned perceiver effect development.…”

“…No attention checks were used. Details on the phrasing of specific items can be found in Rau et al (2020), Kraft et al (2021), and Geukes et al (2019), for Studies A, B, and C, respectively. We subjected each of these ratings to Social Relations Model (SRM; Kenny, 1994) analyses as implemented in the TripleR package (Schönbrodt et al, 2012) in R (Version 4.0.4; R Development Core Team, 2008).…”

“…No attention checks were used. Details on the phrasing of specific items can be found in Rau et al (2020), Kraft et al (2021), and Geukes et al…”

Trait-specificity versus global positivity: A critical test of alternative sources of assumed similarity in personality judgments.

“…Given the vital significance of prosocial behaviors for well-functioning interpersonal relationships and society at large, future research is required to understand the fine-grained processes underlying prosocial behavior that is contingent on beliefs about others. Even though initial evidence linking perceiver effects to cooperation in social dilemmas is ambiguous (Rau et al, 2020), further studies are necessary to tackle this issue.…”