New Methods of Assessing the Accuracy of Interpersonal Perception

Abstract

Everyone is familiar with those studies conducted during the 1950swhich promised an answer to such tantalizing questions as, 'Who are better judges of people, men or women? Psychologists or laymen? Leaders or followers?' Everyone knows too that satisfactory answers were never given because the investigators ran into almost insuperable difficulties of measurement which were nearly all peculiar to the problem they were trying to solve. Several reviewers pointed out the snags at the time (Cronbach, 1958;Bronfenbrenner, 1958;Cline, 1964). Subjects in 'accuracy' experiments, they said, use scales differently from each other, apply their own stereotypes, assume others are similar to themselves, or employ peculiar response sets. According to these reviewers, the 'naive' experimenter confounds all these factors in his score of accuracy and the results are meaningless. But how does one avoid 'naivete'? No one came up with a practicable answer and virtually all progress in the area has been at a standstill ever since.This article hopes to demonstrate that although these criticisms by Cronbach and others may have been valid they ought not to have presented insuperable difficulties to investigators. The basis of this statement is simple. Cronbach and others, by placing emphasis on the means by which an experimenter must arrive at a 'pure' score of interpersonal accuracy, clouded an issue which is logically antecedent. How meaningful did these naively analysed test procedures make the laboratory task of judging others in the first place? I n general, these laboratory studies of the accuracy of interpersonal perception used to (and recent ones still do) set subjects one of two tasks. There is the 'guess the quantity of a trait' task and the 'guess what he would write' task. I n the 'guess the quantity of a trait' task, subjects are given a list of personality traits like extroversion, intelligence, neuroticism, etc., and they are required to state the quantities in which these are possessed by certain stimulus persons. Often a comparison is then made between J. Theory SOC. Behaviour I, 2 . Printed in Great Britain

On What It Means to Know Someone: A Matter of Pragmatics.

“…We do, however, question the idea that such inferences are the most important product of the person perception process. Instead, we propose that inferences about relationship-specific identities (see McHenry, 1971) are critical products of the person perception process, at least as important as are trait inferences. Indeed, if such relatively specific inferences were not critical, it seems unlikely that we would have uncovered evidence that they were associated with high levels of consensus and accuracy and that this consensus and accuracy would be uniquely associated with relationship well-being.…”

“…Knowing What We Need to Know Swann (1984) began with the assumption that we cannot truly understand the person perception process without first asking what that process is designed to do, much as we cannot fully understand the structure of birds' feathers without knowing something about flight (for related arguments, see Marr, 1982;McHenry, 1971;Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997). With this assumption in hand, he proposed that because most social relationships are limited in scope and involve relationship-specific identities and goals (see Swann, Bosson, & Pelham, 2002), it is often unnecessary for perceivers to know every aspect of a target or to consider the target from an "objective" point of view.…”

Accuracy in Judgments of Aggressiveness

“…Second, a perceiver can be accurate about how a target behaves with the perceiver in particular, or circumscribed accuracy. Swann and several others (McHenry, 1971;Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997) have argued that circumscribed accuracy should be much larger than global accuracy because of the pragmatic utility for perceivers to be accurate about how a target behaves specifically with them. For instance, it is usually more beneficial for a perceiver to know whether a target acts aggressively toward her or him specifically than it would be to know whether the target acts hostilely toward others.…”

Accuracy in interpersonal perception: A social relations analysis.

“…But this is only roughly the case because we are looking at the accuracy for a trait across a set of judges and targets, whereas Cronbach examined the accuracy of a judge across a set of targets and traits (Kenny, 1981). Swann(1984), as well as McHenry ( 1971), defined two types of accuracy. Swann defined global accuracy as the ability to predict how a person behaves in general with others and circumscribed accuracy as the ability to predict the behavior of a person when in the presence of the judge.…”

“…Swann (1984), as well as McHenry (1971), defined two types of accuracy. Swann defined global accuracy as the ability to predict how a person behaves in general with others and circumscribed accuracy as the ability to predict the behavior of a person when in the presence of the judge.…”