Leslie Zebrowitz McArthur

Toward an Ecological Theory of Social Perception

The ecological approach to perception (J. Gibson, 1979; Shaw, Turvey, & Mace, 1982) is applied to the social domain. The general advantages of this approach are enumerated, its applicability to social perception is documented, and its specific implications for research on emotion perception, impression formation, and causal attribution are discussed. The implications of the ecological approach for our understanding of errors in social perception are also considered. Finally, the major tenets of the ecological approach are contrasted with current cognitive approaches, and a plea is made for greater attention to the role of perception in social knowing.

Perceiving character in faces: The impact of age-related craniofacial changes on social perception.

Despite considerable evidence indicating that our perceptions of peoples psychological attributes are strongly tied to their facial appearance, there has been almost no systematic and theoretically guided research on this topic. The ecological approach to social perception (McArthur & Baron, 1983) holds that facial characteristics may influence impressions if they typically reveal psychological attributes whose detection is important for adaptive functioning. For example, the facial characteristics that identify infants should reveal their helplessness. The ecological approach further predicts that a strong attunement to adaptively significant facial characteristics may be overgeneralized. In particular, it is hypothesized that adults with immature facial qualities are perceived to have childlike psychological attributes. The research we review provides strong support for this prediction. More specifically, adults with various childlike facial qualities are perceived to afford more warmth, more submission, more honesty less physical strength, and more naivete than those with more mature faces. Implications of the ecological approach for further research on face perception are discussed.

Illusory Correlation in Impression Formation: Variations in the Shared Distinctiveness Effect as a Function of the Distinctive Person's Age, Race, and Sex

Illusory correlation research has identified two factors that lead subjects to overestimate the relationship between particular categories of people and particular types of behavior: associative connections and shared infrequency. Three studies examined the nature of illusory correlation effects when both of these factors operated simultaneously. The results were consistent with previous shared infrequency effects only when infrequency and associations acted in concert. When undesirable behaviors were both infrequent and also associatively linked to a stimulus persons demographic group, there was an illusory correlation between membership in an infrequently appearing group and performance of infrequent, undesirable behaviors. More specifically, stimulus persons who were black, old, or of the opposite sex from the subject were rated more negatively when their demographic group appeared infrequently. Different illusory correlations were obtained when infrequency and associative links acted in opposition, undesirable behaviors being infrequent and desirable behaviors being associatively linked. Under these conditions, associative links overrode infrequency, and there was an illusory correlation between membership in an infrequently appearing group and performance of associatively linked, albeit frequent, desirable behaviors. More specifically, stimulus persons who were white, young, or of the same sex as the subject were rated more positively when their demographic group appeared infrequently.

Adulthood age differences in causal attributions for cognitive, physical, and social performance.

Past research has revealed an unflattering pattern of attributions for the performance of the elderly. More specifically, poor performance by the elderly is attributed to internal and stable factors such as inability, whereas poor performance by the young is attributed to external and unstable factors such as bad luck. In the present study, 42 young (M age = 19.18 years) and 39 elderly (M age = 74.90 years) men and women made causal attributions for their own or for another persons hypothetical performance in the cognitive, physical, and social domains. When attributions for the same performance by young and elderly adults were compared, the results presented an unflattering view of the elderly, similar to the pattern in previous research. In contrast, when attributions for good versus poor performance by the elderly were compared, a more favorable picture emerged: The elderly were more likely to be given credit for their good performance than to be blamed for their poor performance. These findings give reason to question the pervasiveness of the negative view of the elderly that has been presented in previous studies.

Weight Differences in Emotional Responsiveness to Proprioceptive and Pictorial Stimuli

Two studies were conducted to investigate weight differences in emotional responsiveness to proprioceptive and pictorial stimuli. Contrary to past evidence that overweight persons are more emotional than normals, the emotional state of normal-weight subjects fluctuated with manipulations of their facial expression, whereas that of overweight subjects did not respond to these proprioceptive cues. Furthermore, whereas past research employing affectively loaded pictures had found overweight persons to be more emotionally responsive than normals to these external stimuli, no weight differences were obtained in the present studies, which employed less polarized pictures. Implications of these findings for generalizations about weight differences in emotionality are discussed.

The influence of facial characteristics on children's age perceptions.

To examine the impact of age-related variations in facial characteristics on childrens age judgments, two experiments were conducted in which craniofacial shape and facial wrinkling were independently manipulated in stimulus faces as sources of age information. Using a paired-comparisons task, children between the ages of 2 1/2 and 6 were asked to make age category as well as relative age judgments of stimulus faces. Preschool-aged children were able to use variations in craniofacial profile shape, frontal face feature vertical placement, or facial wrinkling to identify the age category of a stimulus person. Children were also able to identify the older, but not the younger, of two faces on the basis of facial wrinkling, a finding consistent with previously demonstrated limitations in young childrens use of relative age terms. The results were discussed in the context of research which reveals parallel effects of craniofacial shape and wrinkling on the age judgments of adults.