Lecture 1.7 and 1.8

Ambady and Rosethal

Ambady and Rosenthal published a study showing that ratings by people who watched three-ten second video clips of a university teacher teaching a class, with no students in the video and no sound, accurately predicted student ratings of the teacher at the end of the semester. All it took was three video clips just like that, all of it non-verbal. Things like whether the teacher seemed confident, enthusiastic, warm, active and so on.

Thin Slice Research Part 2

In 2008, the same research team that did the college yearbook study published a report that examined whether people could accurately guess the sexual orientation of 90 men whose faces were shown in black and white photos. Half the photos showed heterosexual men,half showed gay men, and the faces were cropped from ear to ear, and from the chin to the top of the head, with no background except for white. people were able to detect a stranger's sexual orientation above chance levels, even when the photos were shown for only a twentieth of a second.

Thin Slice Research

The first line of research, kicked off by A Princeton social psychologist named Alex Todorov, examined whether election outcomes could be predicted solely on the basis of judgments about candidate photos. In a 2005 article published in the journal Science, he and his colleagues reported that when they asked people to look at pairs of black and white portraits showing candidates for the US Senate, the candidate who won and the candidate who lost, the individual who is judged as more competent ended up winning the election over two thirds of the time. How long did it take the people to make these judgments? They were able to make them after seeing the paired photos for only one second, and taking an additional second to make the judgment, that is, it took them a grand total of about two seconds to make a judgment that predicted the winner. In fact, a 2007 follow up study, found that people's judgments were just as predictive of an election outcome when they viewed the photos for a quarter of a second than if they were given an unlimited amount of time to look them over, 68.5% in the first case, and 62.5% in the second.

What does the video excerpt on "Human Zoo" suggests about social impressions?

What this video suggests and what research on impression formation has found, is that social impressions are formed with amazing speed, even when people have plenty of time to ask each other questions. In other words, the first few seconds of an interaction between strangers is often the most important time period their relationship will ever have. It may, for example, determine whether they'll work together, whether they'll become friends, date each other, or even get married.

Nick Rule and Nalini Ambady

In 2011, a rather extraordinary study was published by Nick Rule and Nalini Ambady asking people to rate college yearbook photos on a variety of dimensions, some of which had to do with how powerful the person in the photo seemed to be. The photos were all cropped so that only the person's face was visible. All the photos were of the same size, they were converted to grayscale rather than color, so in other words, they were very much standardized. But these weren't any old photos, they were college yearbook photos of people who would later become the managing partners, the head lawyer, for nearly three-quarters of the top 100 American law firms according to the Law.com website. And what the researchers found was that social judgments about how powerful the person looked in college, before the person even entered law school, were statistically related to how much profit the person's law firm made when the person was now the managing partner, 20 to 50 years after college. That's an amazing degree of precision based on social judgments made from one black and white photo taken decades earlier, incredible.

John Gottman

John Gottman, a relationship researcher at the University of Washington, invited 124 newlywed couples to visit his laboratory and be videotaped while they discussed an ongoing disagreement in their marriage. These videos were then rated by independent observers as to how much positive or negative emotion had been displayed in the first three minutes of the couple's discussion. The results? Social judgments of this brief marital interaction significantly predicted which couples were divorced six years later. It's surprising enough that anything could predict divorce six years into the future, but it borders on shocking, that the prediction could be made by strangers watching the couple interact for only three minutes, what's known in psychology as a thin slice of behavior, a brief observation, a small sample of behavior.