Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 196

As mentioned above, people are remarkably skilled at forming impressions based on exposure to “thin slices” of a target person’s overall features, behaviors, and personality (Ambady, 2010; Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993). In a fascinating study, Todorov and his colleagues asked participants to rate photos of U.S. Senate candidates on attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, and competence after only one second of exposure (Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005). Todorov then compared these evaluations to the outcomes of the actual elections and found that ratings of competence were positively and significantly correlated with the voting results: Candidates judged as relatively more competent were more likely to win their respective elections. A later study demonstrated that impressions formed in even less than a second—in fact in as little as one-tenth of a second—closely matched ratings by participants who had as much time as they needed to provide the evaluations on traits such as likeability, aggressiveness, attractiveness, competence, and trustworthiness (Willis & Todorov, 2006).

Ambady and Rosenthal (1992) found that ratings of graduate teaching fellows based on thirty seconds of muted videotape were very good predictors of the evaluations provided by students who spent the entire semester in their classes. Similarly, people can accurately determine male sexual orientation by looking at faces for as little as 50 milliseconds, providing additional evidence of the validity of rapid impressions (Rule & Ambady, 2008). Ambady and Rosenthal (1993) suggest that the ability to make these rapid inferences stems from older, more primitive areas of the brain, associated primarily with the X-system (Lieberman, 2007a). Accurate, rapid inferences about personality traits are formed not only from photos or brief physical encounters but also from other sources of information, including email, dormitory rooms, personal offices, and iPod music lists (see box on page 56) (Back et al., 2010; Gosling, Augustine, Vazire, Holtzman, & Gaddis, 2011; McAndrew & De Jonge, 2011; Wang, Moon, Kwon, Evans, & Stefanone, 2010).

In sum, humans are both extraordinarily fast and surprisingly adept at forming reasonably accurate impressions of others. Not only would this ability have provided our ancestors with adaptive advantages, but it likely helps facilitate successful navigation of our increasingly complex and relationship-dense social world. Humans rely on rapid processing in the person perception process but can and will be more deliberative when needed (Brewer, 1988; Fiske et al., 1999; Todorov & Porter, 2014).