Social perception

Children who are perceived by classmates as being fun increase their peer status over time, but little is known about whether being fun predicts other peer outcomes. Also unknown are mechanisms whereby being fun predicts changes in peer outcomes. Associations with fun, like surgency, suggest that children high in fun are more likely to gain friends while children low in fun are more likely to lose friends, indicating that friend gain and friend loss may serve as intervening links between being fun and peer outcomes. Participants (171 girls, 190 boys) were third to seventh grade students attending a public school in Florida. Across three time points approximately three-months apart, participants reported who their friends were, nominated peers who best fit descriptions of fun and popular, and completed self-reports assessing peer problems. Results indicated that being fun predicted subsequent changes in popularity and peer problems via friend gain but not friend loss. The findings suggest that being fun is a unique predictor of peer outcomes and that friend gain is a mechanism whereby fun children experience positive peer outcomes.

A significant portion of the self is constructed from our actions and the roles
to which they correspond. Although many of our social roles are enacted regularly,
some may lay dormant, yet still influence one's self-concept. We propose that there
are systematic differences in mental representation between these inactive roles and
more active roles. Specifically, inactive roles should be more likely to be construed
in high-level terms, while active roles should be more likely to be construed in lowlevel
terms. Experiment 1 found that for inactive roles, participants displayed an
implicit construal preference for the high-level aspects of the role. Experiment 2
provided evidence that an implicit measure of construal was necessary in order to tap
these unconscious associations. These experiments support the hypothesis that
inactive social roles are mentally represented in a unique manner with respect to more
active roles.

The way we think about ourselves is reflected in, and shaped by, the way we think about our actions. The identification of action can vary from mechanistic, low level depictions to far more comprehensive, high level depictions. This study tests the supposition that comprehensive understanding of action is a precondition for coherence in self-concept and that failure to generate stable, high level action identifications interferes with the formation of a stable and personally certain self-concept. It was predicted (and the results confirmed) that persons who experience fragmented action understanding (i.e., relatively low level action identification) demonstrate less coherence in their overall self-evaluative stance and greater self-uncertainty and self-instability. The relationships between self-concept and coherence (i.e., self-stability and self-certainty) and action identification level was studied in both a context-free manner and with respect to specific social roles. The results expand our understanding of the nature and impact of the organizational processes at work within the self system.

This study explored the relationship between memory and social judgment. Subjects evaluated someone who was described in both desirable and undesirable terms in a taped conversation. They used a computer mouse to express their judgments on a moment-to-moment basis for 90 sec. under one of three instructional sets: memory-based (mouse judgment upon completion of the conversation, based on their recall of information), on-line (mouse judgment while listening to the conversation), and off-line (mouse judgment upon completion of the conversation, based on their judgments formed while listening to the conversation). Half the subjects believed their judgments were relevant to the person's fate (high importance), half believed their judgments were not relevant to his fate (low importance). Subjects in the off-line/important condition demonstrated sustained oscillation in their mouse judgments throughout the judgment period in accord with dynamic integration. In all other conditions, subjects converged on a stable judgment relatively quickly, in accord with static integration.

An experiment was designed to test the differences in trait ascriptions of actors and observers. Hypotheses were derived from Monson and Snyder's (1977) causal attribution model such that actor's attributions about themselves would be more strongly affected by their behavioral history (i.e., traits), and that the trait attributions offered by observers would be more strongly influenced by the actor's momentary behavior. It was found that extraverted actors attributed more extraverted traits to themselves than did observers. It was also found that observers attributed traits to actors that were consistent with the behavior that actors exhibited. However, it was also found that introverted actors also attributed more extraverted traits to themselves than did observers. It was hypothesized that a strong social desirability component was operating to moderate the expected effects. Implications for the Jones and Nisbett (1972) hypothesis and for future research were discussed.

Many studies have been devoted to investigating the process by which individuals make dispositional attributions about the people that they encounter. A surprisingly small number of studies have been directed at examining the process by which individuals may detect change in their impressions of people once they have been formed. In fact, traditional social psychology literature suggests that individuals will engage in a number of processes to maintain or improve, rather than change, their initial attributions. With such alarming divorce rates, it is quite obvious that romantic couples are detecting change in their perceptions of one another. However, romance and attribution research has not been able to fully explain how detection of perception change occurs in romantic relationships. More specifically, traditional linear theories of attribution are not able to clarify how dramatic dispositional change can occur in romantic relationships. Results from an experiment lead us to believe that the detection of dispositional change in romantic relationships is actually quite dynamic, counter to current beliefs in the field. In addition, the Discounting Principle may be used in non-traditional ways.

This study rejects the hierarchical perspective of traditional leadership approaches in public administration. The hierarchical perspective tends to treat public managers at the top as leaders, public employees at the bottom as followers, and leadership as management. This study proposes shared leadership as an alternative to traditional leadership approaches. In theory, shared leadership is not about a hierarchical position but about a mutually shared process that occurs throughout public organizations. The literature has made assertions that shared leadership emerges from horizontal organizations, adaptable cultures, and turbulent environments. However, little research has been conducted to test the effects of these organizational dimension variables on shared leadership in either the public or private sector. This study is a first step to examine the multiple relationships among organizational structure, culture, and context and shared leadership. It is also a first attempt to measure the concept of shared leadership. This study presents case-based empirical research. The study collects data from public employees across the bottom and the top of Broward County government in Florida because the study asserts that every public employee, regardless of hierarchical position, can be a public leader and display leadership. The data was collected using a mail survey of 261 public employees in the county government. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the conceptual model developed in this study. The model consists of five hypothesized positive relationships (hierarchy of position, functional specialization, supportive culture, technology, and organizational crisis), five hypothesized negative relationships (hierarchy of authority, centralization, bureaucratic and innovative cultures, and organizational size), and one positive or negative control variable (gender) with shared leadership. The results show that organizational crisis, technology, innovative culture, and hierarchy of position variables are significantly and positively associated with shared leadership. Public employees' perceptions of shared leadership are partially explainable from organizational structure, culture, and context factors. Indicating that shared leadership occurs in the perceptions of street-level public employees, this study implies that the horizontal and hierarchical perspectives on leadership coexist in bureaucratic organizations. This study concludes that every public employee displays leadership and is a public leader.

Research on social judgment typically emphasizes one of three processes that enable unequivocal understanding of events with ambiguous causality. In the social influence perspective, people are susceptible to the interpretations offered by others. In the explicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with their consciously held attitudes and values. In the implicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with unconscious biases. The model investigated in the present study assumes that these processes vary in salience depending on people's mindset. Participants with low versus high implicit racial bias toward Blacks read a narrative concerning this altercation under either a lowlevel or a high-level mindset and then read a summary that blamed one of the parties or they did not read a summary. As predicted, low-level participants allocated responsibility to the African-American if they had a high implicit racial bias and to the White if they had a low implicit racial bias, regardless of the summary manipulation. Contrary to prediction, however, high-level participants' allocation of responsibility did not reflect their explicit prejudicial attitudes. Instead, they corrected for their implicit biases in their trait inferences and affective reactions, in line with research suggesting that a high-level mindset promotes self-regulatory processes in social judgment.

This research addresses the question of whether individuals or groups induce deeper message processing of persuasive messages. An interaction between group entitativity and whether the group is an ingroup or an outgroup is predicted, where ingroups low on entitativity and outgroups high on entitativity are expected to induce deeper message processing. Entitativity measures the extent an aggregate of people is seen as a group (D. T. Campbell, 1958). Previous research shows contradictory results. S. G. Harkins and R. E. Petty (1987) have shown that high entitativity causes more message focus than low entitativity. R. J. Rydell and A. R. McConnell (2005) have shown that low entitativity causes more message focus than high entitativity. Hypotheses were not supported by the data. Post hoc analyses suggest that motivation to process persons and messages was greatest in the high entitativity ingroup condition. Predictions were revised by adding motivation as a variable.

Many studies have been devoted to investigating the process by which individuals make dispositional attributions about the people that they encounter. Typically, individuals are more likely to seek future interactions with target individuals if those target individuals have a positive or rewarding disposition. Interactions with target individuals possessing negative or punishing dispositions reduce the likelihood that target individual will be selected for future interactions. An initial false positive trait ascription will be self-correcting with future interactions. An initial false negative trait label will likely remain stable if future interactions are not forced. The importance of quick accurate disposition identification carries important evolutionary implications as well as normal-life implications. Results from an experiment support the ability of subjects to accurately identify the true trait of target individuals with limited dispositional information.