So far, we've focused on several ways that our social perceptions can be influenced, or even distorted, by context effects, change blindness, confirmation biases, and a host of other psychological factors. So you might be thinking, do we ever get it right? The answer, as we'll explore in this video, is yes. Not only are we capable of getting it right, but we often make accurate judgments with surprising speed and sensitivity. In other words, a balanced view of social perception is that, on one hand, it can be distorted by all sorts of factors, just as any other perception can be, but on the other hand, it can also operate with surprising efficiency. Let me give you an example. 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! Let me give you another example. 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. The term "thin slice" was coined in a 1992 Psychological Bulletin article by Nalini Ambady and Bob Rosenthal, the same person who documented the Pygmalion effect, and it was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's runaway bestseller Blink. Ambady and Rosenthal conducted what's known as a "meta-analysis"— a statistical technique that combines and analyzes results from different studies (literally, an analysis of analyses, a meta-analysis). And what they found, based on a review of 38 different results reported by a wide variety of researchers, is that judgments about people's personality, or whether they're telling the truth, or whether they're clinically depressed, were just as accurate, if not more so, when the judgments were based on thin slices of behavior less than five minutes in length. In fact, a year after the 1992 article, 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. What I just showed you was exactly ten seconds of a professor teaching. All it took was three video clips just like that, all of it nonverbal— things like whether the teacher seemed confident, enthusiastic, warm, active, and so on. Professor Ambady and her colleagues have also found that long term physical therapy outcomes could be predicted after people watched only one minute of silent video footage focused on the therapist's nonverbal behavior. The sales effectiveness of a sales manager could be identified after listening to the person's voice for only 20 seconds, with the words masked to keep the tone of voice but hide the content of what was said. And, in a similar study, the more dominant a surgeon's voice was rated, the more likely the surgeon was to have been sued for malpractice—voice ratings that were made after listening to only 40 seconds of the doctor speaking. Now, if these results seem incredible, just hang onto your hat for two more examples of 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 U.S. Senate, the candidate who won and the candidate who lost, the individual who was judged as more competent ended up winning the election over two thirds of the time. The photos you see here were one of the pairs used in the study, which Professor Todorov was generous enough to share with our class. And you can see which candidate you judged as most competent in the Snapshot Quiz. If it was Russ Feingold, the candidate on the left, you would have accurately predicted the election results. How long did it take 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. These were political candidates, I should underscore, whom people had never even seen before, and yet they rendered these judgments with lightning speed. 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. Here's what a quarter of a second looks like—you ready? I'll show you that one more time, just in case you missed it. Here we go... Remarkable, huh? And a study published in 2012 found that even if you show people headshots for two seconds without most of the face, their competence judgments still predict the winner 65% of the time. So, clearly, people can size up strangers with remarkable speed, but the results we've discussed leave two key questions unanswered. First, can people make thin-slice judgments that are accurate when it comes to personal characteristics and other aspects of a person's identity? Remember, we don't know whether the candidates who were judged competent actually are competent; we just know that perceptions of competence predict election outcomes. And second, if people can make accurate judgments, how fast can they do it? Well, I warned you to hang onto your hat for two last examples of thin-slice research. Here's the second one. 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. This slide shows a transformation of my own photo that the researchers kindly supplied so that our class can get to see the sort of image that they used. In the real study, they didn't use any photos of men with jewelry, with glasses, or facial hair, just to keep the focus on facial features alone. So, were people able to identify the sexual orientation of male strangers from a photo? And if so, how rapidly were they able to do it? The answer is that 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. To give you a sense of how blisteringly fast that is, I've set up a simulated trial that you can experience in this video. So, if you were a participant, you would just look at the cross in the center white area when it appears, watch the 50-millisecond flash of the photo, followed by what's known as a "mask" for a tenth of a second afterward, and then you'd press a key on your keyboard to give your answer: the Z key if you think the person's gay, or the forward slash key if you think the person's straight (that is, heterosexual). So, you ready for the simulated trial? Here goes... Isn't that something? That was 50 milliseconds—a twentieth of a second—so fast that we barely even recognize we've seen a face, and yet, even if we're not consciously aware of what we've seen, our brain is able to process the information and render judgments that are correct more often than you'd expect by chance alone. So now, if we go back to an item in the Snapshot Quiz, the answer should be clear. The item said, "Social judgments made during the first minute of meeting a stranger are not usually reliable and accurate." Let's pause for a moment so you can see how you answered. What's the correct answer according to the research record? Drum roll, please… False. How does it happen? Well, researchers are not entirely clear. There have been several theories advanced. For example, one idea is that there may be evolutionary value in being able to rapidly judge if other people are threats, potential partners, or even effective leaders. There's also some evidence that our brains are wired to process emotions more rapidly than cognitions. For example, we might know how we feel before we know why we feel that way. And of course, thin-slice judgments happen so fast that they might simply avoid distractions that could lower their accuracy. Regardless, we can now put the pieces together from the past several videos to see both the strengths and weaknesses of social perception. Social judgments can take place very rapidly, sometimes with more accuracy than we might think. At the same time, they're also prone to certain biases and distortions, and once these judgments are formed, whether accurately or not, we tend to lock in and search for confirming evidence rather than challenging the judgments we've already made. So, first impressions matter. Let's end with a brief pop-up question on the topic of first impressions, a topic that we'll explore further in the next video.
