Perceptual Distortion of Height as a Function of Ascribed Academic Status

Wilson, Paul

doi:10.1080/00224545.1968.9919806

Cited by 153 publications

(75 citation statements)

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“…Subjects overestimated the height of the man to the greatest extent when they believed he had a high status. 57 Similarly, family members may overestimate the heights of the father, because of his role within the family.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimates of the heights and weights of family members: accuracy of informant reports

1998

Int J Obes

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OBJECTIVE: Information about the accuracy of family informant estimates of height and weight should assist investigators in evaluating the costs and bene®ts of using this type of data in genetic study designs. DESIGN AND METHOD: To assess the accuracy of family informant estimates, 374 ®rst-degree relatives from 94 Caucasian families, gave estimates about the heights and weights of their ®rst degree relatives. These estimates were compared with measured heights and weights to determine their accuracy. RESULTS: Informant estimates were highly predictive of measured heights (r 0.95), and weights (r 0.94), but informants systematically overestimated heights (mean 1.4 cm) and underestimated weights of their family members (mean 4.1 kg). CONCLUSIONS: On average, height estimates were generally within 1% of the measured height and weight estimates were within 3 ± 5% of the measured weight. Therefore, these proxy measures can provide useful data, when measured or self-reported heights and weights are not available.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimates of the heights and weights of family members: accuracy of informant reports

1998

Int J Obes

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“…For example, P. R. Wilson (1968) manipulated academic status by introducing a male stimulus person as a student, demonstrator, lecturer, senior lecturer, or professor, to different groups of observers at Cambridge University. The observers' subsequent memory estimates of the person's height were an increasing function of the status variable, with the student recalled to be shortest and the professor tallest.…”

Section: Implicit Attitudes: Empirical Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes.

Greenwald

Banaji

1995

Psychological Review

5,227

112

3,659

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Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. However, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusionthat attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes have important implicit modes of operation-extends both the construct validity and predictive usefulness of these major theoretical constructs of social psychology. Methodologically, this review calls for increased use of indirect measures-which are imperative in studies of implicit cognition. The theorized ordinariness of implicit stereotyping is consistent with recent findings of discrimination by people who explicitly disavow prejudice. The finding that implicit cognitive effects are often reduced by focusing judges' attention on their judgment task provides a basis for evaluating applications (such as affirmative action) aimed at reducing such unintended discrimination.Long before they became central to other areas of psychological theory, concepts of cognitive mediation dominated the analysis of social behavior. The constructs on which this article focuses achieved early prominence in social psychological theory with formulations that were partly (attitude) or entirely (stereotype) cognitive. By the 1930s, Allport (1935) had declared attitude to be social psychology's "most distinctive and indispensable concept" (p. 798), Thurstone (1931;Thurstone & Chave, 1929) had developed quantitatively sophisticated methods for attitude measurement, and Braly (1933, 1935) had introduced a method that is still in use to investigate stereotypes. Self-esteem, an attitudinal construct to which this article gives separate treatment because of its prominence in recent research, also has a long-established history (e.g., James, 1890; see overview in Wylie, 1974Wylie, , 1979.Through much of the period since the 1930s, most social psychologists have assumed that attitudes, and to a lesser extent stereotypes, operate in a conscious mode. This widespread assumption of conscious operation is most evident in the nearuniversal practice of operationalizing attitudes (including selfesteem) and stereotypes with direct (instructed self-report) measures. The pervasiveness of direct measurement for attitudes and stereotypes was documented by Greenwald (1990) and by Banaji and Greenwald (1994) and is further reviewed below. In contrast, this article describes an indirect, unconscious, or implicit mode of operation for attitudes and stereotypes. 1 Anthony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, University of Washington; Mahzarin R. Banaji, Department of Psychology, Yale University.Preparation of this report as well as conduct of some of the research reported in it were supported by National Science Foundation Grants DBC-9205890 and DBC-9120987 and by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH-41328. We thank...

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“…In experiments conducted in Western university settings, participants made to feel of elevated status underestimate another's size and weight, whereas participants made to feel of reduced status overestimated these attributes . Likewise, participants induced to feel socially powerful overestimate their own height and underestimate others ' (Duguid & Goncalo, 2012).Students estimate a target individual to be taller when he is described as a professor than when he is said to be a student (Wilson, 1968), and perceptions of the height of political candidates track electoral success or failure (Sorokowski, 2009). Words semantically related to high or low status prime related verticality schemas (Zanolie et al, 2012).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Students estimate a target individual to be taller when he is described as a professor than when he is said to be a student (Wilson, 1968), and perceptions of the height of political candidates track electoral success or failure (Sorokowski, 2009). Words semantically related to high or low status prime related verticality schemas (Zanolie et al, 2012).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Looming large in others' eyes: racial stereotypes illuminate dual adaptations for representing threat versus prestige as physical size

Holbrook

Fessler

Navarrete

2016

Evolution and Human Behavior

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We hypothesize that, paralleling the evolution of human hierarchies from social structures based on dominance to those based on prestige, adaptations for representing status are derived from those for representing relative fighting capacity. Because both violence and status are important adaptive challenges, the mind contains the ancestral representational system as well as the derived system. When the two representational tasks conflict, owing to the exigent nature of potential violence, the former should take precedence over the latter. Indeed, separate literatures indicate that, despite the fact that threatening traits are generally deleterious to prestige, both threatening individuals and high-status individuals are conceptually represented as physically large. We investigated the interplay between size-based representations of threat versus prestige by examining racial danger stereotypes. In three studies, we demonstrate that (a) judgments of status only positively correlate with envisioned body size for members of groups stereotyped as safe, (b) group-based inferences of interpersonal threat are mediated by representations of physical size, (c) controlling for perceived threatening aggressiveness reduces or reverses non-positive correlations between status and size, and (d) individuating information about relative threat or status attenuates the influence of group danger stereotypes. These results support our proposal that ancestral threat-representation mechanisms and derived mechanisms for representing social rank coexist -and sometimes compete -in the mind.Keywords: intergroup bias; prejudice; formidability; status; threat detection 3 IntroductionAll social species exhibit hierarchies in which position is a determinant of fitness.Selection can therefore be expected to have crafted mechanisms that enhance decision-making in hierarchical interactions. Nonhuman social hierarchies are principally based on dominance, the supplanting of rivals through force or the threat of force. In contrast, while violence plays a role in some human interactions, many human hierarchies are built on prestige, deference granted by admirers to those whom they esteem (Barkow, 1975(Barkow, , 1989Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).Although there is debate over the extent to which some non-human primates also display elements of prestige-based status (Chapais, 2015), humans are undoubtedly unique in the extent to which prestige eclipses dominance as the foundation of social rank. Natural selection operates through the modification of existing features. Given that dominance is the ancestral basis of social organization while prestige is the derived basis, it is likely that prestige-representing adaptations were derived from dominance-representing adaptations. Because existing design often constrains the range of subsequent possibilities, derived adaptations frequently share a mix of conserved ancestral components in addition to novel features (Marcus, 2008). This suggests that the mechanisms used in reasoning about prestige-based f...

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Perceptual Distortion of Height as a Function of Ascribed Academic Status

Cited by 153 publications

References 9 publications

Estimates of the heights and weights of family members: accuracy of informant reports

Estimates of the heights and weights of family members: accuracy of informant reports

Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes.

Looming large in others' eyes: racial stereotypes illuminate dual adaptations for representing threat versus prestige as physical size

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