21.9. Asks for orientation. 1.7 to 5.7. Asks for opinion. 1.7, 2.2. Asks for suggestion. 0.5, 1.6. Disagrees. 4.0, 12.4. Shows tension. 1.0, 2.6, shows antagonism, 0.3, 2.2. Back to text. See the topic of conversation. This can affect interaction in a number of ways. The topic may be impersonal, remote, and abstract, or it can be highly personal. Conversation on more personal topics creates intimacy so that it may be compensated for by reduction of eye contact. As X-Line has found, X-Line Gray and Shueti, 1965.

[01:05]

If one speaker reveals intimate things about himself, this encourages the other to do the same. An example of reciprocity. Page 173f. The topic may be cognitively easy or difficult, which will affect paralinguistic variables such as rate of speech and number of speech errors. It may be concerned with matters external to the speakers, or it may be about the interaction itself. There is an awkward silence, isn't there? Page 117f. Goffman, 1957, has observed that such second-order utterances can be very disruptive, and this is an important example of the limits of verbal communication, C.F. page 75. The topic of conversation may be very interesting to the other, in which case he will be keen to talk about it, or uninteresting, embarrassing, or in other ways displeasing to him. D.

[02:06]

In specialized ways of interaction, particular kinds of utterances may be important. In psychotherapy research, for example, the distinction between interpretation and reflection is crucial, since a former is associated with Freudian psychoanalysis, the latter with Rogerian non-directive therapy. Again, in the personal interview in which a subordinate is disciplined, inviting the other to give his point of view may be a crucial move. E. Speeches may have latent meanings. Sometimes these are unintentional, as when a speaker reveals things he hadn't meant to reveal. Psychiatrists speak of listening with a third ear to such messages. Sometimes they are partly or unthinkingly intended, as with the person who said that Nigeria was a place I've not been to. Page 70. Sometimes the manifest message is the real message, as in the games played by Byrne's patients

[03:06]

1966, and C.F. page 348. It has been observed by McPhail that such games are also played by schoolchildren and teachers. Please, sir, the bell's gone. When it hasn't, please miss the board's shining. Please, sir, what did you do in the war? P. McPhail, personal communication. In these cases, the speaker is... trying to control or disrupt the hero's behavior, and uses a message whose manifest content is untrue or misleading. F. Jokes are rather infrequent in laboratory discussion groups, but common in families and groups of friends. They serve to create a feeling of cohesion and euphoria in the group, and are an example of informal discourse which is concerned with establishing and enjoying interaction as opposed to serious problem-solving or persuasion. The linguistic structure of utterances. Krauss and Weinheimer, in a number of experiments, have studied the conditions under which long or short phrases are used to refer to objects cited by Moscovici, 1967.

[04:19]

When an object is in the midst of similar objects, a longer phrase is used. It becomes less easily codable. Unfamiliar, infrequently occurring objects needed longer phrases, though these became shorter with repeated use. A simplified code was being arrived at. When there is feedback in Windows indicates that the correct objects are being referred to, the messages become shorter. Moscovici look sit interprets this as an example of shorter distance between the communicators. Page 118. Under some conditions, messages have more repetition of words measured by the type-token ratio or by the number of new words introduced during periods of discussion. Moscovici found that there was more repetition when speakers were under pressure to reach a conclusion, probably because they needed to arrive at a common code in order to reach an agreement. It is suggested that the relatively repetitive...

[05:24]

A restricted code found among working-class people by Bernstein, 1959, is a result of such pressures. For middle-class people, reduced pressure makes possible the diversification of words used by drawing on other sources outside the immediate conversation. In another experiment, it was found that a greater variety of words was used when discussing the parts of a car with a specialist than with a friend, and that more technical words were used, Moscovici, Loxit. In the experiments referred to above, no changes were produced in the grammatical structure. Such differences are, however, found if spoken and written messages are compared, spoken languages generally less redundant, less elaborate, less well-organized syntactically, and employs more verbs. Moscovici, log-sit, page 256. In an experiment by Moscovici on Plan 1966, it was found that pairs of subjects sitting back-to-back or side-by-side spoke more in the written style compared with subjects sitting face-to-face or screened.

[06:39]

It is surprising... that the screen situation was not like the back-to-back in this respect, and the authors explained their results in terms of unfamiliarity rather than lack of vision in the first two conditions. Back and Strickland, back 1961, found that when two groups of three subjects were given... group tasks, and had to communicate by written messages. The latter contained more nouns and adjectives, i.e. more like writing, if emphasis was placed on work efficiency and formal organization. The differences between speaking and writing give us a dimension of formality of linguistic style. Formal speech is similar to writing and appears in purest form when someone reads out a carefully prepared speech. Writing also varies in formality from scientific papers and business letters to love letters and letters between adolescents. In addition to having a different grammatical structure, the second kind of letter contains a lot of paralinguistic information, such as underlinings and exclamation marks.

[07:42]

Informal speech occurs on relaxed and intimate occasions between friends and in families and is found to be ungrammatical However, the main purpose of such conversation is probably not to convey information at all in the usual sense, but to establish and sustain social relationships between people. Juice, 1962, distinguished five degrees of formality which he suggested were used on different sorts of occasions, intimate, casual, personal, social, consultative, formal, and frozen. There are also individual styles of speech. Sanford, 1942, gives samples from the speech of two students. The speech of one of them was complex, perseverative, thorough, uncoordinated, cautious, static, highly definitive, and stimulus-bound.

[08:44]

We might conceive of his whole style as defensive and deferent. It seems to reflect a desire to avoid blame or disapproval. The speech of the other was colorful, varied, emphatic, direct, active, progressing always in a forward direction. His speech is confident, definite, and independent to express his personality and to impress the auditor. the organization of verbal and nonverbal elements, the links between verbal and nonverbal elements. When a person speaks to another, he inevitably emits nonverbal signals as well. We showed earlier that verbal communication depends on the nonverbal background in several ways. A. Each interactor must signal continuously by his attentiveness and responsiveness to others. B. There must be continuous regulation of speaking and listening. C. Interactors must signal their attitudes and intentions towards the others. D. Gestures accompany speech to illustrate it in various ways.

[09:48]

E. Speakers need continuous feedback about how their utterances are being received. Page 72F. A person who stood staring into space with expressionless face would not succeed in communicating with anyone. In general, the nonverbal elements would be supportive of the verbal. A person delivering bad news should sound gloomy and not roar with laughter. A person giving a subordinate the sack should not sit side by side in close proximity. Since verbal elements are easier to control than nonverbal ones, there is sometimes a failure of the latter to confirm the former. A public speaker who is very nervous may manage to smile and sound relaxed, but shakes from head to foot and perspires visibly. Ekman and Freisen, 1967a, observe that hand and foot movements sometimes signal messages. that are quite inconsistent with the utterances being produced, such as the patient's flirtatious leg display when talking about her attitude to the therapist.

[10:56]

The best-known example of such inconsistent behavior is the double bind. Page 120. Bateson and his group 1956 suggest that the origin of schizophrenia was to be found in the way parents and especially mothers communicate with their children. The mothers of schizophrenics, it is suggested, send messages which are inconsistent in one way or another. Examples which have been given are A. Of course I love you, spoken in a very angry voice. B. A mother who stiffened when her son pulled his arm around her shoulders, but who said, Don't you love me anymore? See communications that, in effect, order the child to disobey. Subsequent research, however, has failed to confirm the hypothesis that this is the origin of schizophrenia. Shruhan, 1967, though Argyle, et al., 1969, found that when none... Verbal and verbal cues conflicted for being hostile or friendly, the total signal was found to be disturbing and confusing, though this did not happen when they conflicted for being superior or inferior.

[12:08]

Verbal and nonverbal signals as alternates. Language is normally used to discuss facts, opinions, and problems. Nonverbal signals are used to express emotions and interpersonal attitudes. Page 75. However, each can substitute for the other to a limited extent under certain conditions. An interactor may resort to speech when nonverbal methods have failed. This may be necessary with schizophrenics or others who are insensitive to nonverbal cues. When verbal signals fail, there is withdrawal or aggression. For example, if a young woman wants a young man to become less amorous, She first acts in a cool, distant way. If this does not have the desired result, she says, please, let's just be good friends, etc. If this is no good, she stops his face and departs. Or a person whose efforts at impressive self-presentation have failed might say, look here, young man, I've written more books about this than you've read. If this produces mirth or derision, the self-presenter will depart and try to present himself to someone else.

[13:17]

Nonverbal signals can, to a rather limited extent, take over the functions of words. Words may fail because two people don't speak the same language. They may fail because of noise, distance, or deafness, and special gesture languages grow up to deal with these situations. They may fail because of lack of verbal skill, and illustrative gestures can be particularly helpful when a person is asked to describe a spiral. Nonverbal cues... Really only work when a sign language exists or when gestures can illustrate. Otherwise, their power to substitute for language is very small. Words can be used in place of nonverbal cues in several ways. Page 121. They are more successful when used in a subtle and indirect way. We discuss later how self-presentation can be carried out successfully by means of words. Page 384F. Emotive sounds can be replaced by emotive words. Intimate auditory and visible signals can be replaced by the discussion of intimate topics.

[14:23]

These forms of words have more effect than bald, direct statements of the form. I am very clever. I don't believe you. Please stop talking to me. I want to talk to someone else. There are certain people whose job it is to put into words what is normally signaled non-verbally. Chairman at lectures and public relations officers engage in presentation of the merits of others, though not of themselves. Poets are skilled at putting emotions into words. Psychotherapists and social skill trainers are experts at commenting on the social performance of others. It is an established part of their role, which makes it more acceptable, and they do it in an extremely delicate and tactful manner, which is constructive and inoffensive. patterns, and groups of elements. Social interaction consists entirely of the verbal and nonverbal elements which have been described. It is necessary, however, to consider groupings of elements which constitute higher-order units with a new significance of their own.

[15:28]

An example is warmth, which consists of a combination of facial expression, direction of gaze, posture, proximity, orientation, tone of voice, and content of speech all sustained over a period of time. Such a pattern of elements is generated by a single interpersonal attitude and may be consciously controlled as a unitary style of behavior. The perceiver may not be aware of the separate elements, but integrates them and interprets the total pattern as a single unit. We shall come across several kinds of higher-order groupings of elements. One, that may... The factor analysis of interaction in groups commonly yields two dimensions of interaction style, dominance and affiliation. FOA, 1961. These styles, also occurring combination, is shown in figure 3.8. When a person persistently behaves in a certain manner in different situations, he is said to possess the corresponding personality trait of dominant, extroversion, rewardingness, social anxiety, etc.,

[16:34]

Two, interviewers, supervisors, psychotherapists, and other professional social skill practitioners have complex patterns and sequences of social responses for dealing with their clients. The skilled performer emits higher-order groupings, e.g. a Morse sender sends words rather than letters. Three. The relations between members of a dyad or a small social group can usefully be analyzed in terms of the roles adopted by those present. They must agree on the roles to be played on the group, e.g., who is the leader, and also on the identities presented by the members. Page 122. These roles and identities are negotiated at the level of the elements of which they consist. Page 203. Figure 3.8, Combinations of Dominant and Affiliative Techniques, Gao, 1957. This is in the form of a square, although no actual square is present. On the left is the word low affiliation.

[17:37]

There is a line from low affiliation to the right, high affiliation. On the top of the chart is the word dominance. Opposite the word dominance on the bottom is the word dependency. There are two columns within the box. Some words are above and some words are below the line of low affiliation and high affiliation. Analysis. criticizes, disapproves, judges, resists. Below the line, evades, concedes, relinquishes, retreats, withdraws.

[18:38]

Second column, above the line, advises, coordinates, directs, leads, initiates. Below the line, acquiesces, agrees, assists, cooperates, obliges. Back to text. Strategies. Sometimes an interactor produces a number of responses in a planned sequence in order to elicit some reaction from others. For example, a person telling a joke may build up some expectation in his fears of how the story will end and then suddenly produce a quite unexpected ending. The personal interview for dealing with unsatisfactory subordinates may consist of eight definite passages in a particular order, page 304F. A second aspect of strategies is that they usually involve taking account of the other person's reactions at earlier points in the series.

[19:43]

This may follow the general principles of continuous correction and the responses to feedback from the other as described in Chapter 5. There may also be special ways of dealing with the main types of reaction which the other may show. For example, a salesman may first show an article of intermediate cost and then produce more or less expensive alternates depending on the customer's reaction. The skilled interviewer knows how to deal with the various kinds of awkward responses respondent that he may encounter. An interesting feature of strategies is that they usually enable the performer to control the interaction unless the others are aware of the strategies in hand and can take independent action. Appendix to Chapter 3 on pages 123, 124, 125, and 126. End of Chapter 3. Page 127, Chapter 4, Perception of the Other During Interaction, Introduction, and Methods.

[20:49]

Person perception has been extensively studied in recent years, and several good accounts of this work are available, e.g., Peggy Urie, 1969, Smith, 1967. Much of the research has taken person perception as a primarily cognitive problem, rather akin to concept formation or problem-solving, and, of course, these procedures are important here. In this chapter, we will look instead The term perception is used here somewhat in a different sense from the way it is used in experimental psychology. We are not concerned with whether A perceives B to be short or tall, dark or fair, but with A's inferences about B's personality, emotional state, attitudes to himself, and so on.

[21:58]

In other words, we're concerned with inferences about another person based on his visible or audible behavior. The perception of persons is a more complex matter than the perception of other physical objects, since the sensory inputs are normally obtained as part of the process of interaction. There are two main channels of information, visual and auditory, and both are open intermittently. The other speaks for only part of the time, emitting verbal and nonverbal noises, and the judge can look for relatively short intervals. Inferences are made because they are needed by each interactor, and the kind of inferences made depend on the situation and the relationship between the interactor. The other person is seen not only as an object of perception, but as another center of conscious experiences and intentions, and as a perceiver himself. Page 128. An emphasis on cognitive processes in much past research has resulted in highly inadequate methods from the point of view of social interaction. We discussed earlier the danger in experimental research is stripping off crucial aspects of the phenomenon. This is precisely what has happened in the field of person perception so that a good deal of work in this area has little relevance to real social behavior.

[23:06]

In many studies, a person's perception to social interaction takes place between judges and subjects. In the well-known experiments by Ash, A-S-C-H, 1946, for example, subjects were given lists of words like intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm, determined, practical, cautious, and were led to believe that these words referred to a real person and asked to give a description of this person. It may be objective that cues about other people are rarely received in this verbalized manner so that this does not at all represent what goes on in real-life person perceptions apart from reading testimonials. The fact that a series of experiments with interesting results has been reported does not alter this conclusion. The results refer to a very special laboratory situation which is more akin to a word association test than to any other kind of social behavior. B. Similar criticisms can be made of another popular technique in this area, showing subjects photographs and asking them to judge the emotions or personality traits that the person photographed or a target person may be shown very briefly to the judges.

[24:10]

So little data is presented to the judges, but what is presented has an exaggerated effect. Point in 1944. Found that a person seen briefly while wearing a spectacle was judged as more intelligent than when seen not wearing them. However, this effect is eliminated by seeing five minutes' conversation on the part of the target person. Page 135. The alleged effects of judgments of untidy hair, lipstick, and even race may be inflated by the absence of true social interaction in the experiments. C. In real life, people who are angry do not usually adopt guerrilla-like expressions like the people in the photographs, which are often found. On the contrary, they try to conceal their feelings. Coleman, 1949, found that emotions could be perceived from the mouth region of actors portraying emotions, but not from photographs of naturally expressed feelings. Similarly, people do not normally announce that they are cold, unintelligent, and bad-tempered, as in the wordless experiments. On the contrary... They try to present a more favorable impression of themselves.

[25:10]

An interviewer has dealt with the interviewee and penetrate his misleading behavior. D, on the other hand, people do display a wide range of facial expression during encounters, but these do not... are not due to sudden changes of emotion or of personality. Kend in 1967 observed such changes during quiet conversations between pairs of people who were asked to get acquainted. He observed many of these expressions are simply parts of larger units of interaction. A smile is a part of greeting and saying farewell. A frown is a part of trying to understand or assign a concentration, and so on. E. The kinds of questions with... which an interactor may ask, and the extent to which he can scrutinize another depend on the nature of the situation and its rules. A clinical psychologist can ask patient intimate questions, but the patient cannot do the same. Experiments using wordless have often presented judges with conflicting data to be reconciled. In practice, the judge would solve this problem by collecting further data, which is one of the main purposes of the assessment interview. F in real encounters, people are...

[26:12]

able to look at the other person for only part of the time, which may be as low as 0 to 10%, hence the actual input of visual information may be very low. Gee, it may be very misleading to ask subjects to judge stimulus persons in terms of... The experimenter's categories and dimensions. A given subject might, for example, not normally discriminate between people who are extroverted or introverted. He would not treat them differently and would not know what cues to use, and he would thus appear to be very insensitive. The same person might, however, be an expert on social class differences. We shall describe later experiments showing that people give more extreme judgments and dimensions which are important to them. Page 154F. Hasdorff, Richardson, Dornbusch, 1958, argued that psychologists would be less concerned with accuracy and more concerned with which categories are used by judges. There has indeed been a shift toward using free descriptions as a research method to understand the process of person perception as it functions during interaction. Therefore, we shall be cautious about adopting the results of much of the published work done on the subject's

[27:17]

What research methods are acceptable to this field, we can consider separately. One, the stimulus materials. Two, the recording of responses. And three, the manipulation of variables. One, stimulus materials. We shall emphasize studies in which there is some interaction between judges and subjects. The judge may interview the subject or they may work together in a joint task. or interact in some other way. Slightly less satisfactory are studies using films or tape interviews as stimulus materials. Least satisfactory are still photographs and lists of attributes said to be possessed by the subjects. Page 130. In real interaction, the judge observes while he is interacting and is able to seek further information, for instance, by asking questions. Two, recording the response. New techniques of recording the perceptual response have been accompanied by corresponding advances in conceptualization.

[28:21]

The earliest studies using rating scales such as lowest to submissive and highest dominant. Such scales force subjects to use them whether they normally use the dimensions or not. It should be noted, however, that the use of rating scales in personal assessment is extremely important It makes accessors decide what they are looking for, and it increases the comparability of the assessments. They should focus on these dimensions so that the latter become more salient to them. Research in person perception took a big step forward when a different method was introduced, simply asking people to write free descriptions of those they had seen. Paradoxically, it corresponds to an older method in personal selection. This method makes it possible to discover which dimensions are salient to a person if he consistently refers to, for example, the social class observed.

[29:24]

It is deduced that the dimension is important or salient for him. Research on salience will be reviewed later. A third basic method for studying perceptual responses was introduced by Kelly, 1955, the repertory grid. There are three steps. One's subjects are asked to fill in the names of people occupying certain roles in the life, such as teacher you like, friend of the same sex, etc. From 10 to 15 names are usually elicited this way. Two subjects are asked to compare these names, three at a time, out of each triad. They are asked which pair is most alike, and in which way this pair differs from the third. If you're after sorting it in... Individuals and triad subjects are then asked to sort the remaining people in the grid in terms of the construct they have used for the three selected individuals. By this technique, the dimensions of a person can be discovered as well as such derivative measures as his cognitive complexity, i.e. the number of independent dimensions he uses, and the statistical relations between dimensions.

[30:28]

Byary et al. 1966, Bannister and Mayer 1968, page 131.3, Manipulation of Variables, Given satisfactory means of presenting the stimulus and recording the perceptual response, all that remains is to manipulate the necessary experimental values. Example of such manipulation will be given later, the motivation of the judge, the relations between judge and subject, the personality of the judges, and so on. Interpretation of the Elements of Interaction In Chapter 3, we presented the elements of behavior, verbal and nonverbal, that are used in social encounters. We are now concerned with how these are received and interpreted by others in the situation. It is interesting that the same item of behavior can be the basis of several distinct kinds of inference. If a person smiles, for example, this may be interpreted in forms of personality, e.g. he is well-adjusted. or as an emotion he is pleased, or as an attitude to others he likes me, and so on. In this section, we shall consider the mankind's perceptual inference about others and the way in which they are made.

[31:34]

Interpretation is personality. One of the main ways in which another's behavior may be interpreted is to suppose that he possesses a certain kind of personality. In a clinical or assessment interview, the interviewer is mainly concerned with such perceptual goals. A person meeting someone else for the first time will be concerned with the permanent features of the other in order to predict his future behavior in order to select an appropriate style of social behavior to deal with him. Thus, perception of B results both in A behaving towards B in a certain way and in A constructing a cognitive model of B's personality. Most research in this area has concentrated on the cognitive model rather than on the behavior, and it has thus assumed the cognitions mediate between stimuli and behavior. However, people respond during interaction to stimuli of which they are not consciously aware. such as the other eye movements and bodily postures, so we shall have to allow for the possibility of intervening cognitions being unconscious. The way in which cognitions mediate between stimuli and behavior may be illustrated by the following example.

[32:42]

If B has a long nose, A may conceivably perceive him as a Jew, Egyptian, Lebanese, or Roman. Which interpretation A makes will depend on his past learning experiences with noses. His behavior will depend on the interpretation he makes. Page 132. In a real interaction situation, as opposed to looking at a photograph, A will seek further information on this point if racial origins are important to him. Under what condition will the other person's behavior be interpreted in terms of permanent personality traits? Heider, 1958, pointed out what... that whereas we perceive other environmental events as part of the impersonal causal network of the natural world, the actions of people are seen as intentional, as consciously willed, and as acts for which they are responsible. However, there is often some ambiguity about another's motivations, in particular when his actions have more than one consequence. In these cases, we may not interpret them in terms of personality in the usual way.

[33:45]

Another example Haider gives is when a person is seen to fail through lack of ability rather than because he didn't try. Several experiments have been carried out within this framework of ideas and have carried the matter further. Hybar and Reichen, 1955, found that high-status yielders were seen as doing so much more voluntary than low-status yielders. Jones found that high-status flatters were seen as more sincere than low-status ones. These experiments are discussed further below. There are other cues to a person's sincerity. Next line, Edel, 1961, found that if A looks B in the eye, A is seen as being more sincere. This is to some extent justified, since X-Line has found that when a person has been implicated in cheating, he looked an interviewer in the eye less. This was not the case, however, for subjects scoring high on Machiavellianism. In another experiment, Jones et al., 1961, played tape recordings of job interviews to subjects.

[34:52]

In these recordings, the experimenter described the ideal submariner as very gregarious and other-directed, or the ideal astronaut as strong in inner resources and very inner-directed. Candidates were listened to who either displayed the ideal requirements for the jobs or the reversed one. Subjects then rated the candidates. The results show that when a candidate behaved in role, he were... was perceived as moderately affiliated and moderately independent. Candidates who behaved out of role, however, were seen as very high on affiliation for the astronaut other or independence for the submarine inner. Readings were made with far more confidence in the out-of-rule cases. Thus, the behavior of a person who conforms to a stated role or norm is much less informative than the behavior of a deviant. In practice, people take some account of the situation when making inferences about personality. A person seeing laughing is not necessarily regarded as permanently happy, extroverted, or well-adjusted.

[35:55]

If, for example, he has just been told a good joke at which everyone else is laughing too, page 133. However, there is one feature of the situation which it is rather difficult to make allowances for. The presence of the perceiver himself. A only sees B when A is present himself, unless he is an expert in the use of disguises, one-way screens, etc. A tutor finds it hard to imagine his polite and submissive pupils as they are when he is not there, taking part in militant demonstrations at drunken and promiscuous parties, etc. It is found that the interviewer has rather low reliability, i.e. interviewers often form different impressions of the same candidate. Part of the reason for this is that the candidate actually behaves differently with the different interviewers. One of the main processes involved in person perception is the assignment of people to categories and the application of the relevant stereotypes.

[36:57]

This is clearly important for interaction purposes. Mostly people, for example, behave differently towards male and females, so that it is important to know the sex of the people they are dealing with. A given person will probably vary his interaction style with some dimensions of individual difference, but not with others, e.g. he may respond differently to people of different sex and age, but not according to the social class or whether they are Jewish or not. Stereotypes have been studied mainly by means of verbal methods. There are the classic ways of finding by Katz and Braley, 1933, about the stereotypes attributed to... By Princeton, students to various ethnic groups, which seem to show a high degree of agreement with their population, 84% thought Negroes were superstitious, 79% thought Jews were shrewd, and 78% thought Germans were scientifically minded, for example. It is interesting to note that in a later study of Princeton students by Gilbert in 1951, it was found that these stereotypes had become considerably weaker.

[38:03]

The three percentages quoted above had dropped to 41%. and 62% respectively. It may be objected that the method used, asking which of 84 words applied most to each group, is open to the criticism that it encourages subjects to express stereotyped judgments and that their behavior with real members of the groups mentioned might not be affected. The apparent decline in stereotypes could simply be because it's no longer intellectually respectable to hold these views. It's possible, however, that a prejudiced person might be influenced during interaction by expectations that a person would fit the stereotype and might take a long time for it to be overcome. But how is the assignment of people to categories performed? Ultimately, it depends on inferences from particular physical cues such as gray hair and wrinkles. For age, accent and clothes. For class... Facial features were raised. Lambert et al. 1960 demonstrated the effects of accent on person perception in Montreal by asking subjects to judge tape recordings of speakers who were able to speak English both in Canadian and a French-Canadian accent.

[39:15]

Page 134. English-speaking subjects gave more favorable judgments to speakers when they were using their Canadian accent. A height, good looks, intelligence, dependability, kindness, ambition, and character. There's also a more direct way of making inferences about personality by going straight from physical cues to inferred traits. A number of investigators have studied the inferences made by Americans. Here's Alport's summary of the findings. One to describe a dark-skinned person attributes of unfriendly, hostility, lack of humor. Two, to ascribe to blondes' various favorable qualities, one study shows that fiction tends to make its heroes blonde as villains swarthy and dark. Three, to see faces with wrinkles at eye corners as friendly, humorous, easygoing. Four, to see older males as more distinguished, responsible, and refined than younger males. Five, to see older women as motherly. Six, to perceive people wearing eyeglasses or with high forehead as more intelligent, dependable, and industrious.

[40:20]

Seven, to perceive smiling faces as more intelligent. The moral here is that if you are applying for a job, submit a smiling photograph. If you are an employer, pay no attention to it. Eight, to perceive women with thicker than average lips as sexy and those with thin lips as asexual. Nine, to consider bold lips as indicating conceit. demandingness, even immorality, tend to attribute to any Negro face the stereotypes of superstition, religiosity, easygoingness. Eleven to see faces that are average in size of nose, hair, grooming, set of jaw, and so on as having more favorable traits than faces that deviate, e.g. by having prominent or receiving features. Apparently, we feel safer with someone who does not depart from the cultural realm. Similar inferences can come from a person's speech, clothes, bodily movements, and so on. Research on judgments of personality from speech show that it is easier to judge occupation than personality traits.

[41:25]

Kramer, 1963, though other studies show that different kinds of mental patients do have characteristics of ways of speaking. Oswald, 1965, page 135. However, these results were obtained from studies of the kind criticized above. They used photographs of very brief exposure, which tends to exaggerate the effects of any data presented to subjects. Some experiments have shown this quantitatively. For example, Brunswick 1945 found that judgments of IQ correlated 0.25 with the height of the person judged, but actual IQ correlated only 0.10. Argyll and McHenry found that target persons were judged as 13 points of IQ more intelligent when wearing spectacles, and when seen for 15 seconds, however, if they were seen during five minutes of conversation, spectacles made no difference. How are these influences from bodily appearances and speech personality made? Secord, 1958, suggests that analogy or metaphor may be involved.

[42:26]

For example... A person with a coarse skin is seen as coarse. Influences may be based on functional qualities. A girl with full lips is seen as highly sexed. A person with spectacles is intelligent. There may be also a generalization from the personalities from similar people. who have been known in the past. Sometimes the origins of these inferences are rather obscure. Why should people who wear spectacles be seen as more intelligent, for example? It used to be thought that this was due to an inference a spectacle wearer could read. It's recently been found by Jehoda 1963 that short-sighted people are, on average, more intelligent than normal. How far can personality traits be perceived with accuracy during interaction? There have been a considerable controversy over the validity of the interview for personal... selection, and clinical diagnosis. At the present time, it appears that good interviewers are probably as good as available tests in certain areas, as such as motivation, interpersonal skills, traits like neuroticism and authoritarianism, and some aspects of cognitive functioning, e.g.

[43:29]

creativity and practical judgment. C.F. Ulrich and Trumbull, 1965. There are, however, great individual differences between interviewers. The assessment of such traits can be based to a limited extent on a candidate's or client's performance in the interview itself. More useful, however, is questioning directed to his behavior in relevant situations in the past. In order to assess neuroticism, for example, an interviewer can inquire about the other's reactions to various stressful situations, about what situations are people upsetting, and about headaches, fatigues, and other stress reactions. Page 136, Interpretation as Emotions. Another person's behavior may be categorized not as a constant feature of its personality, but as an emotion he is undergoing temporarily. Sometimes both inferences are made. A person seen smiling may be judged as being in a happy state and also as being well-adjusted.

[44:32]

We will consider separately the interpretation of emotions from facial expression, bodily movements, and posture. and the tone and context to speech. In practice, information from all these sources is received simultaneously. Many early experiments on facial expression were concerned with the recognition of emotions from photographs, often of actors displaying exaggerated poses. Under these conditions, there was a rather poor degree of recognition by judges, typically 60%. However, in other studies, subjects were provided with information about the situation in which the target person was in, Here the success rate was considerably higher by 1969. Schlossberg, 1952, found that discriminations could be made if very different emotions are compared, and he constructed a scale along which emotions can be arranged in a circle corresponding to variations along two dimensions, pleasant-unpleasant and attention-rejection. Emotions which lie next to one another on the circle are harder to discriminate between than those which are farther apart.

[45:34]

For example, surprise and happiness could be confused more easily than surprise and disgust. Figure 4.1, Schlossberg, 1952. Here I'll read figure 4.1, which is on page 137. The dimensions of facial expression from Schlossberg, 1952. Okay, I'm going to start at the top of the circle and go around clockwise. Love, happiness, mirth. Surprise. Fear, suffering. At the bottom of the circle, anger, determination. Disgust. Contempt. And again, back up to love, happiness, mirth. Back to text, page 136. A recent contribution to this problem has been made by Stringer, 1967, who asked subjects to group photographs together. Then he performed a cluster analysis and found the following groupings, worry, disgust, thoughtfulness, and happiness.

[46:36]

Other studies have been concerned with the effects of specific facial cues. It's been found by Tagiuri, 1968. The surprise and fear are recognized from cues in the top part of the face while laughing and smiling are seen in the bottom half. Harrison 1965 presented subjects with drawings of faces in which eyebrows, eyelids, and mouth were systematically varied. He found that raised eyebrows were seen as surprised, half-raised brows as worry, and a single raised brow as disbelief. Wide-open eyes were seen as alertness, half-closed eyes as boredom, and up-curved mouth showed happiness, down-curved mouth as distress. Facial elements were seen in combinations. Bayer and Schiff, 1967, in a rather similar study, found that lowered brows and upturned mouth together are seen as findish. Facial movements are also important. For example, rapid blinking is seen as anxiety. It's interesting to note that the labels given to facial expressions include a number which are not strictly emotions, such as surprise and disbelief.

[47:36]

Page 137. These are comments on the ongoing situation, usually on what has been said. S1965 found that male students preferred photographs of females whose pupils have been enlarged in the photos, presumably because pupil enlargement is a signal for arousal. This is an interesting example of a facial cue which is responded to without awareness. More recently, research has been extended into cues other than facial expression. Ekman and Price in 1967A showed judges silent films of the hand and foot movements of patients in psychotherapy interviews. There was considerable agreement on the emotion which the judges thought were being expressed. For example, hands toss was seen as uncertainty or defensiveness, and hand shrug rotation was seen as frustration or exasperated anger. Charbonne and Hardick, 1953, prepared a set of stick figures and asked subjects to describe the emotions represented by various postures. Examples of the findings are given in figure 4.2.

[48:39]

Compared with facial expression, bodily postures and gestures are a relatively poor channel of communication. Ekman and Friesen, 1967, agreed, concluded that the body can communicate whether the emotional state is generally positive or negative, and also how intense the emotion is, but cannot usually convey the specific emotion. Nine verbal aspects of speech have been studied to find out how emotions are transmitted. Page 138. David's 1964 prepared tape recordings of actors reading a neutral passage and asked subjects to judge the emotions being expressed. The following emotions were portrayed. Admiration, affection, amusement, anger, boredom, cheerfulness, despair, disgust, fear, impatience, joy, satisfaction, and surprise. Stable individual differences were found in sensitivity to the emotional aspects of speech, which were found to be correlated with sensitivity to facial expressions and the ability to express emotions.

[49:46]

Differences also found in the extent to which people attended to emotional states of speech. Blind people are found to be high on this, but not sensitivity. Schizophrenics, however, are low on sensitivity, large... Lal G., 1967, working at Oxford, recently completed a study of some of the physical cues involved in judging emotion from speech. Speech was judged as most anxious when of medium speed and with many speech disturbances, least anxious when it was fast and fluent. It was judged as contemptuous when slow with non-odd disturbances. Figure 4-2, emotional states communicated by posture from Sarban and Hardick, 1953. have boxes 18, 20, 39, and 45 from their experiment, have a guy, a stick figure there, looks like he's standing there shrugging, disinterested, describing, resigned, doubtful, questioning.

[50:47]

Number 20 shows a guy with one hand on his hip, and he's... Has his legs crossed, so he's basically balanced on one foot. The other, maybe he's using a toe to help balance him. And then his hand is leaning against the wall. And the words down there are self-satisfied, impatient, describing, casual, angry. Number 39, balanced on both feet, one foot just slightly forward from the other, head looking basically downward. toward the right thigh, figure facing toward us, and then the arms coming together in front of him and a little to the side, one hand just beside the other. Described as being shy, self-conscious, ashamed, modest, sad. Number 45, person standing there, very...

[51:51]

Trevlek boldly having legs spread apart, balanced evenly on both legs, and arms crossed across the chest, head pointed toward the left side, not forward. This rider surprised, dominating, suspicious, undecided, aloof. Back to text, page 139. There are certain basic problems about the perception of emotion. One is that there is considerable variability in the way in which an emotion may be expressed. Indeed, the same person may use different modes of expression on different occasion. There are also differences between individuals, and there are differences between cultures and social classes. Furthermore, as mentioned above, emotions cannot be judged accurately unless the context of the visible expression is known. While this may be a criticism of studies using photographs, interaction studies provide much more contextual information they may not on the other hand provide much of a baseline concerning the normal state of the subject being observed if a person was normally extremely gay and euphoric but on a particular occasion was rather quiet those who know him well would interpret this differently from those who hadn't seen him before the face appears to be the main region for communicating emotions

[53:12]

It is the area that is looked at during interaction, it signals emotion fairly clearly, and there are innate patterns of expression. The innate expressions are however overlaid with cultural modifications, mainly... restraining the expression of strong feelings. Chinese girls are instructed not to smile easily and not to show their teeth while they smile. This leads to the same expression, being seen as sly or blank by Westerners and happy by Orientals. In the West, on the other hand, people are encouraged to smile a lot. Facial expression is to a large extent under deliberate control and is used to communicate with others. Of all forms, a non-verbal behavior in communication is at least spontaneous. There is... It is therefore very difficult to penetrate polite smiles and other forms of controlled self-expression to estimate the emotion presented behind them, since the perceiver tends to respond automatically to the expression. Bodily posture and gesture, on the other hand, while less informative than facial expression, are also less carefully controlled, like men and freshmen.

[54:19]

Frasher, 1967-8, suggests that there is a leakage of the true emotional state into such uncontrolled bodily movements. A nervous interviewee may smile but tremble, for example. Tones of voice communicate more clearly than bodily movements, but may be controlled. There are also individual differences in awareness and control of these cues for emotion. Bodily posture and gestures are, to a lesser degree, tones of voice tend not to be noticed except by those who are unusually sensitive, have a special interest in these things, or have been specially trained. Pains 140, on the other end, people seem to respond to more than they are aware of perceiving, such as pupillary expansion or head nods. Interpretation as interpersonal attitudes. When A observed B behavior, he may interpret it in terms of B's attitudes toward himself or B's attitudes to other people, C and D. The cues and process is involved, and the two cases are similar, though they are experienced differently.

[55:27]

We shall consider here the two main dimensions of B's attitudes towards others, the extent of liking versus rejecting and feelings of dominance versus submission. What are the cues for perceiving whether B likes someone or not? As we showed in the last chapter, such attitudes are not usually expressed in words and can... better be signaled by the various kinds of nonverbal communication. If B likes A, he may show this by looking him in the eye with a friendly facial expression, bodily contact, and proximity, sitting side by side, and so on. This behavior may or may not be intentional on B's part, but in either case, A may be sensitive to such cues and be able to perceive correctly what B's attitude is. Facial expression is probably the clearest signal for liking and disliking. Thayer and Schiff, 1967, varied facial expression and movements toward and away using animated faces and found that facial expression was much the stronger cue for judgments of friendly, hostile. How does the observer know that friendly expression indicates an interpersonal attitude rather than an emotional state?

[56:28]

This is not yet known, but two factors seem likely. Firstly, there is the immediate behavioral or verbal context. Secondly, A will interpret B's expression interpersonally if B looks at A in the eye and orients him towards b at the same time as we showed before page 107 a high level of gaze direction is interpreted as an attempt to establish a more intimate relationship combined with a smile this will be seen as a friendly approach Moravian carried out an experiment in which an interviewer talked to two subjects, but looked at A more than a B while orienting his body towards B rather than A. The subject looked at most thought... The subject looked at most thought that the interviewer liked him more. Direction of gaze was found to outweigh the effects of bodily orientation. Kenda, 1967, found the subjects thought that an interviewer who did not look at them for part of the interview had lost interest in what they were saying.

[57:32]

Bodily posture is a third cue to interpersonal attitude. Arabian, 1968, showed photographs of people in experimentally varied bodily postures. Page 141. He found that they were seen as friendly when sitting in a relaxed posture, leaning forwards with an open posture, females, or closed posture, males. Females were seen as more friendly than males. A side-by-side orientation combined with proximity is seen as friendly. Otherwise, a direct orientation usually indicates a positive attitude, Arabian opposite. Bodolic contact often indicates a friendly attitude, and the precise way in which an act of contact is performed may signal the way the other person sees a relationship, in particular the degree of intimacy he desires. There is a sense in which such comments of bodily contact are dramatic indicators of one party's attitude to the other. The perceived significance of these events depends on course on the situation and the relationship in question.

[58:32]

Being shaken by the hand in a reception line means precisely nothing. Not being shaken by the hand would mean a great deal. Being kissed by an aunt is different from being kissed for the first time by an attractive member of the opposite sex. Attitudes of dominance and submission are expressed by the variation to the same themes. This can be perceived from facial expression, patterns of eye movement, bodily posture, and so on. Dominance is signaled by a hottie and smiling expression with raised head. Submission is shown by a nervous, apologetic smile and lowered head. Dominance can be established by staring another person down. In a group situation, however, Weisbrod 1965 found that those individuals who were looked at most by speakers in the group saw themselves and were seen by other members as being more powerful in the group than those who were looked at less. Dominance and submission are perhaps most clearly conveyed by tone of voice... Dominance is conveyed by a loud, confident style submission by a softer, nervous tone of voice. There are also verbal cues to dominant submission in an experiment to be described below subjects were addressed in different ways.

[59:38]

One, it is probably quite a good thing for you subjects to come along to help in these experiments because it gives you a small glimpse of what psychological research is about. In fact, the whole process is far more complex than you would be able to appreciate without a considerable training in research methods paralinguistics, and kinesic analysis, and so on. Two, these experiments must seem rather silly to you. I'm afraid they're not really concerned with anything very interesting and important. Page 142. We'd be very glad if you could spare us a few moments afterwards to tell us how we could improve the experiment. We feel that we are not making a very good job of it and feel rather guilty about wasting the time of busy people like yourself. Argyle, Bergnus, Nicholson, Selter, and Williams, 1969, carried out an experiment to study the relative impact of verbal and nonverbal cues for dominant submission. Three verbal contents were used. Dominant, equal, and neutral. Two are given above. Three nonverbal styles were used consisting of different tones of voice, facial expression, and head orientations.

[60:42]

Videotapes were... prepared, and the speakers were shown life-size and on a TV monitor. Ratings on two of the dimensions are shown in figure 4.3. As can be seen, the nonverbal cues had a greater effect than the verbal had. When the superior nonverbal style was used, the verbal content had almost no effect. Figure 4.3 effects of inferior, neutral, and superior verbal and nonverbal signals on somatic rating. From Argyle et al., 1969. Two graphs First one is verbal, showing I, N, S, and 1 through 7 inferior to superior. S, the highest, and second, I, third. Verbal, I, N, S, and 1 through 7 from friendly to hostile. N, I, and S from lowest to highest.

[61:46]

both showing nonverbal. Moravian and Weiner, 1967, carried out a rather similar experiment in which single words were heard from a tape recorder. Three classes of words were used conveying positive, neutral, and negative effect. Speakers conveyed positive, neutral, and negative effect by tone of voice. In a later experiment by Moravian and Ferris 1967, vocal and facial expressions were varied independently. The combined results of these two studies show that nonverbal cues had much more impact on subjects' reaction than the actual words used, and the following equation was derived. Page 143. Perceived attitude equals .07, verbal, plus .38, tone, plus .55, An objection to both Argyle and the Moravian studies is that percentage of variance depends on the vigor with which variables are manipulated. However, in both sets of studies, highly contrasted verbal contents were used, and rather similar results were obtained.

[62:50]

How accurate are perceptions of the interpersonal attitudes of others? Tagiuri, 1958, studied the perception of preferences in 60 groups of well-acquainted people, varying from 6 to 35 in number of members. Subjects made few major errors about who accepted them and who rejected them. 4% of choices were seen as rejections, and 9% of rejections were seen as choices. But most errors consisted of mistaking choices or rejections for missions. Acceptance was perceived considerably more accurately than rejection. Probably overt cues for rejection are inhibited in polite Western society. Perception of choices between others and the popularity of others were also judged with considerable accuracy. While an interviewer is trying to assess the interviewee, the latter does not try to assess the interviewer. He is more concerned with how the interviewer perceives him. In other words, A is trying to perceive how B perceives A, what Lange et al., 1966, called the meta-perspective. We shall consider later the various conditions under which the meta-perspective becomes dominant and when interactions are primarily concerned with imagining how the other person sees things.

[63:57]

Page 374FF. Lange et al., that's spelled L-A-I-N-G, upset, go a step further into A's perception of B's perception of A's perception of B. They call this the meta-meta perspective, and they provide evidence that such perceptions are less accurate within disturbed marriages than in happy marriages. This variable is perhaps most familiar in a situation where B dislikes or thinks ill of A, but does not want A to know this. B will then be concerned with A's perception of how B sees A. Perception during interaction. The goals of perception in interaction. As was shown in Chapter 2, social interaction can be motivated by a number of different drives. Motivation will affect the perceptual activity that takes place. The social situation, which is most similar to the looking at photographs kind of experiment, is when A sees B at a party or in some other open setting and is deciding whether or not to interact with B. Page 144.

[65:04]

The problem here is one of predicting B's behavior will be be sufficiently entertaining an agreeable person to talk to. Is he likely to be able to tell A the way, etc.? The prediction here is about behavior which is relevant to A's goals in a particular situation and whether B is likely to be able to help him to realize those goals. If A decides to initiate an encounter with B, A's initial problem is to select an appropriate interaction style from his repertoire that is suitable for B. If A behaves differently to others of different sex, age, and social class as everyone in fact does... He needs to be able to categorize B in terms of these variables and whatever others are salient for him. At this stage, then, A is concerned with certain demographic and personality variables in B. Once this is done, that particular perceptual task is over, though some revision may be made in the light of further evidence of B. During the encounter itself, A is concerned with eliciting certain responses from B or with establishing and maintaining some relationship with B. In order to do this, A needs continuous information about B's reactions to his own behavior so that he can modify it if necessary.

[66:13]

A may simply want B to like him, or A may have other quiet personal motivations with regard to B, or A may want B to learn, buy, vote, or respond in terms of mainly professional goals, which A has. In either case, A needs to know what progress he is making with B. He may be concerned with B's attitude towards himself, with B's emotional state, with B's degree of understanding, or with other aspect of B's response. In some situations, A's main concern is with B's opinions, attitudes, belief, or values. This is obviously true of social survey interviews, but in many more informal situations... People want to find out how far their own attitudes have social support from others and how far their ideas about the outside world are correct. In other situations, for example, interviews for personal selection and personality assessment, the main object may be to assess personality, either in order to understand its clinical origins or to decide upon its suitability for a given job. In other situations, such as law courts or interviews with administrators, it is more a matter of deciding what sanctions to apply. Here, the personality is matched against some social norm of the behavior that is required.

[67:16]

Jones and Tybot, 1958. There are some of the motivations that govern social interaction and the perceptual activities to which they give rise. It is clear that perception becomes focused on different cues in each case. Furthermore, the actual judgments made also may be affected. Jones and DeCharms, 1957, asked subjects to work on a series of problems in groups. Some were going to be rewarded for their individual performances or For others, the whole group had to succeed for any member to be rewarded. Page 145. The second condition was intended to arouse interpersonal motivations of a cooperative kind, and each group a confederate failed by prior arrangement. He was seen as less dependable when his failure affected the group. This was especially true when the tasks were presented as tests of motivation rather than of intelligence, as motivation is more under intentional control than intelligence. perception, and different types of interaction. The process of perception also varies with the kind of social interaction which is taking place.

[68:19]

We shall follow here the topology first posed by Jones and Taibot, 1958, and Sarban, Taft, and Bailey, 1960, adding to it considerations put forward by Argyle and Kenda, 1967. Firstly, there are various kinds of non-reciprocal social situations, i.e. A's behavior is not affected by B's, and vice versa. There is no true social interaction at all. This covers the experimental situations in which person's perception has often been studied and which were criticized above. It also includes watching someone on TV and observing other people from a distance. Other instances have been described as pseudo-reciprocal. For example, participants in military and religious ceremonies and actors in plays. In these cases, each player knows this complete part and is affected by the others only in respect of the timing of his responses. Finally, there is parallel behavior. For example, when two people are talking, but when neither is really listening to what the other has to say. This may occur when mothers tell each other about their children. The author recalls such behavior among RAF air crews returned from a flight.

[69:21]

A more extreme case of parallel behavior is conversation by schizophrenics who talk, regardless of whether the other person is speaking or not, and on totally unrelated topics. See page 337FF. In the observation at a distance case, there may be no need for any perceptual information at all unless the judge is wondering whether to interact with the subject or whether to vote for him, etc. In most of the other cases mentioned, the only perceptual information needed is about the timing of the other's responses. The second kind of interaction is reciprocal but asymmetrical. i.e., A's responses depend on B's, but B's do not depend on A's. Most interaction is asymmetrical to some degree. But this is the extreme case. Here, B can do as he likes and follows a predetermined plan of action, while A's behavior is contingent on B's. Page 146. One example is when B is an interviewer who is using a set schedule of questions and make little use of follow-up probes. In fact, all social skill performers are to some extent in this position, leaders, teachers, therapists, etc.,

[70:24]

The behavior is, however, partly determined by clients, since special controlling and correction techniques have to be resorted to in order to deal with them. Another example of asymmetrical interaction is a social psychology experiment in which there is a carefully programmed confederate. The perceptual requirements in the case, for example, of interviewer and respondent will be rather different. The interviewer, if he is using a fixed schedule of questions, will not need any information about the respondent's interaction, but only about his answers to the questions. He is interested in building up a cognitive model, not in choosing an interaction style. The respondent may be aware that the interviewer has a fixed plan of action in which case he will try to discover what it is. If he is not aware that the other is behaving in a program manner he may interpret the program in terms of personality. It is only possible to make correct deductions if one has extensive experience with other operators of the program or performers of the role. In most asymmetrical situations a performer does not need continuous information about the other's response for interaction purposes. He will want to know whether his socially skilled activities are being successful.

[71:27]

or whether some modification is needed in his performance. An interviewer is in a strong position for gathering perceptual information if he wants it. Besides melee observing the other's behavior, he can probe for further information and can even vary his own style of interaction deliberately to see how the other responds, as in the stress interview and the standard interview, page 110. Thirdly, there may be symmetrically reciprocal interaction between A and B. Neither has more of a predetermined program than the other, and the course of the encounter is the outcome of a genuine two-way interaction between them. This can, of course, be extended to situations involving more than two people. Each interactor requires continuous perceptual information about the reactions of the other. in order to make his own future responses as effectively as possible. As Jones and Taibot 1958 suggest, there is a conflict between obtaining perceptual information and the planning of future responses. In other words, perceptual input may become distracting.

[72:30]

We shall show in the next section how this conflict is in fact resolved through strategies of perceptual activity during interaction. Each interactor may, like the interviewer, probe for further information about the other, page 147. This is likely to happen at first meeting, especially if the other presents himself unclearly. The process is, however, severely restricted by conventions about how far it is socially acceptable to ask personal questions. Several experiments have compared the effects of different kinds of social interaction on the resultant perceptions. For example, it is found that leaders judge followers more accurately than followers judge leaders. FOA, 1958, and Sarban et al., 1960, report that in asymmetrical interaction, the programmed person can judge better than the other person can judge him, as it would be expected from the above analysis. It also found that the peer or buddy ratings are more accurate predictors of future behavior than are ratings by superiors, i.e., symmetrically reciprocal behavior...

[73:32]

leads to better perceptions than asymmetrical. Although a superior officer, etc., can probe more, he sees a more artificial, more carefully controlled sample of behavior than do members of the peer group. The Pattern of Perceptual Activity During Interaction Before any interaction takes place at all, A may have quite a lot of information about B from what others have told him. This will give A... more or less precise expectations about how B is likely to behave and how he needs to be handled. It may sensitize him to certain aspects of B's behavior. They may meet through introduction, by belonging to the same group, through professional dealings at a party, etc. In each case, A will maneuver himself into an appropriate spatial position with a certain proximity and orientation. The spatial positioning will be selected partly on grounds of intimacy and interpersonal attitudes, as was shown in the last chapter. It will also be affected by perceptual considerations. A will want to be able to see and hear B as well as possible, and may or may not want B to see him.

[74:35]

At a noisy gathering, they will have to stand close together in order to hear, and this will entail standing side by side or at an angle. As shown in the last chapter, the choices of spatial positioning and orientation are partly the result of visual and auditory accessibility. In formal situations, these are often far from satisfactory. As Michael Frayn, 1967, points out, the position of the seats at a banquet is a particularly irritating arrangement because one's neighbor to the left and right whom one can hear but not see are usually women and thus may well be more rewarding to see than to hear, while the figure opposite who can be seen but not heard is almost certainly a man, a species in my experience more agreeable to hear than to see. Page 148. If A is interviewing B, he will probably put B in a good light and may put himself in a weaker one. This practice is not being recommended, but it is commonly used. A person may sit with his back to the wall or in the back row at a lecture so that he can see others and not be observed by people whom he can't see.

[75:41]

The last two examples are due to people preferring to be observers rather than observed in social situations. A phenomenon which is discussed later, page 374FF, Human social interaction normally uses two perceptual channels, hearing and vision, and the two are closely linked. Both are openly, intermittently actors, pardon me, interactors, look at the other between 25 and 75 percent of the time. They look all the time, if behind a one-way screen, but are prevented from doing so in normal interaction because of the high level of eye contact generated. Hearing is intermittent, since people usually take turns to speak and listen. These two channels are linked in that people look over twice as much while listening than while speaking, and because the visual channel is used to help the verbal auditory channel in a number of ways. Page 72FF. When several people are speaking at once, audition can be selected.

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