Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×

Online ordering will be unavailable from 17:00 GMT on Friday, April 25 until 17:00 GMT on Sunday, April 27 due to maintenance. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Hostname: page-component-669899f699-cf6xr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-26T22:55:48.047Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Accuracy of perceiving social attributes

from Part I - Domains of accurate interpersonal perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2016

By
Ravin Alaei  and
Nicholas O. Rule
Edited by
Judith A. Hall ,
Marianne Schmid Mast  and
Tessa V. West
Judith A. Hall
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
Marianne Schmid Mast
Affiliation:
Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
Tessa V. West
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access

Summary

Abstract

A wealth of research shows that people can achieve accurate interpersonal judgments of others based on brief observations of their nonverbal cues. Here, we review evidence demonstrating that people can accurately judge others’ kinship, sexual orientation, religious identity, political ideology, and professional success from subtle cues in their physical appearance and expressive behavior. Following this discussion, we detail some of the major factors that can influence the accuracy of these judgments. Finally, we end by reflecting on what this research has elucidated about basic processes in person perception and nonverbal behavior more generally.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Social Psychology of Perceiving Others Accurately , pp. 125 - 142
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Allport, G. W., & Kramer, B. M. (1946). Some roots of prejudice. Journal of Psychology, 22, 9–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alvergne, A., Huchard, E., Caillaud, D., Charpentier, M. J. E., Setchell, J. M., Ruppli, C., Féjan, D., Martinez, L., Cowlishaw, G., & Raymond, M. (2009). Human ability to visually recognize kin within primates. International Journal of Primatology, 30, 199–210.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alvergne, A., Oda, R., Faurie, C., Matsumoto-Oda, A., Durand, V., & Raymond, M. (2009). Cross-cultural perceptions of facial resemblance between kin. Journal of Vision, 9, 1–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ambady, N., Hallahan, M., & Conner, B. (1999). Accuracy of judgments of sexual orientation from thin slices of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 538–547.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Andrzejewski, S. A., Hall, J. A., & Salib, E. R. (2009). Anti-Semitism and identification of Jewish group membership from photographs. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33, 47–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arantes, J., & Berg, M. E. (2012). Kinship recognition by unrelated observers depends on implicit and explicit cognition. Evolutionary Psychology, 10, 210–224.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bailey, J. M., Kim, P. Y., Hills, A., & Linsenmeier, J. A. (1997). Butch, femme, or straight acting? Partner preferences of gay men and lesbians. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 960–973.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ballew, C. C., & Todorov, A. (2007). Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 17948–17953.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barnes, M. L., & Sternberg, R. J. (1989). Social intelligence and decoding of nonverbal cues. Intelligence, 13, 263–287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, D. J., & Shapiro, J. M. (2009). Thin-slice forecasts of gubernatorial elections. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 91, 523–536.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berger, G., Hank, L., Rauzi, T., & Simkins, L. (1987). Detection of sexual orientation by heterosexuals and homosexuals. Journal of Homosexuality, 13, 83–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brambilla, M., Riva, P., & Rule, N. O. (2013). Familiarity increases the accuracy of categorizing male sexual orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 55, 193–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brédart, S., & French, R. M. (1999). Do babies resemble their fathers more than their mothers? A failure to replicate Christenfeld and Hill (1995). Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 129–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carahaly, L. (2000). Listener accuracy in identifying the sexual orientation of male and female speakers. Unpublished manuscript, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. (2004). The recognition of other individuals’ kinship relationships. In Chapais, B. & Berman, C. M. (Eds.), Kinship and behavior in primates (pp. 347–365). Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costanzo, M., & Archer, D. (1989). Interpreting the expressive behavior of others: The Interpersonal Perception Task. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 13, 225–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeBruine, L. M., Smith, F. G., Jones, B. C., Craig Roberts, S., Petrie, M., & Spector, T. D. (2009). Kin recognition signals in adult faces. Vision Research, 49, 38–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ding, J. Y. C., & Rule, N. O. (2012). Gay, straight, or somewhere in between: Accuracy and bias in the perception of bisexual faces. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 36, 165–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorfman, D. D., Keeve, S., & Saslow, C. (1971). Ethnic identification: A signal detection analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 373–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). Nonverbal leakage and clues to deception. Psychiatry, 32, 88–106.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Elliott, D. N., & Wittenberg, B. H. (1955). Accuracy of identification of Jewish and non-Jewish photographs. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 57, 339–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, J. B., Johnson, K. L., Ambady, N., & Rule, N. O. (2010). Sexual orientation perception involves gendered facial cues. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1318–1331.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.Google Scholar
Hall, J. A. (1984). Nonverbal sex differences: Communication accuracy and expressive style. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, J. A., Andrzejewski, S. A., & Yopchick, J. E. (2009). Psychosocial correlates of interpersonal sensitivity: A meta-analysis. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33, 149–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallahan, M. (1998). Reanalysis of Berger, Hank, Rauzi, and Simkins, 1987. Unpublished manuscript, Clemson University.Google Scholar
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, K. L., Gill, S., Reichman, V., & Tassinary, L. G. (2007). Swagger, sway, and sexuality: Judging sexual orientation from body motion and morphology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 321–334.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, K. L., & Ghavami, N. (2011). At the crossroads of conspicuous and concealable: What race categories communicate about sexual orientation. PLoS ONE, 6, e18025.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaminski, G., Dridi, S., Graff, C., & Gentaz, E. (2009). Human ability to detect kinship in strangers’ faces: Effects of the degree of relatedness. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276, 3193–3200.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaminski, G., Ravary, F., Graff, C., & Gentaz, E. (2010). Firstborns’ disadvantage in kinship detection. Psychological Science, 21, 1746–1750.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keller, L. F., & Waller, D. M. (2002). Inbreeding effects in wild populations. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 17, 230–241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., Martin, C. E., & Gebhard, P. H. (1998). Sexual behavior in the human female. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1953).Google Scholar
Krauss, S. (1996). Winners of the first 1960 televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. Journal of Communication, 46, 78–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, E. (2007). Sexuality in context: Variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society, 36, 533–554.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, D., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2007). The architecture of human kin detection. Nature, 445, 727–731.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Linville, S. E. (1998). Acoustic correlates of perceived versus actual sexual orientation in men’s speech. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 50, 35–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lund, F. H., & Berg, W. C. (1946). Identifiability of nationality characteristics. Journal of Social Psychology, 24, 77–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lundström, J. N., Boyle, J. A., Zatorre, R. J., & Jones‐Gotman, M. (2009). The neuronal substrates of human olfactory based kin recognition. Human Brain Mapping, 30, 2571–2580.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Macfarlane, A. (1975). Olfaction in the development of social preferences in the human neonate. In Porter, R. & O’Connor, M. (Eds.), Parent-infant interaction (pp. 103–113). Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Macrae, C. N., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2000). Social cognition: Thinking categorically about others. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 93–120.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Macrae, C. N., & Martin, D. (2007). A boy primed Sue: Feature‐based processing and person construal. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 793–805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malatesta, C. Z., Fiore, M. J., & Messina, J. J. (1987). Affect, personality, and facial expressive characteristics of older people. Psychology and Aging, 2, 64–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maloney, L. T., & Dal Martello, M. F. 2006. Kin recognition and the perceived facial similarity of children. Journal of Vision, 6, 1047–1056.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Merton, R. K. (1948). The self-fulfilling prophecy. The Antioch Review, 8, 193–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munson, B., & Babel, M. (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues, or, projecting sexual orientation through speech. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 416–449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicholas, C. L. (2004). Gaydar: Eye-gaze as identity recognition among gay men and lesbians. Sexuality and Culture, 8, 60–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olivola, C. Y., Sussman, A. B., Tsetsos, K., Kang, O. E., & Todorov, A. (2012). Republicans prefer republican-looking leaders: Political facial stereotypes predict candidate electoral success among right-leaning voters. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3, 605–613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penton-Voak, I. S., Perrett, D. I., Castles, D. L., Kobayashi, T., Burt, D. M., Murray, L. K., & Minamisawa, R. (1999). Menstrual cycle alters face perception. Nature, 399, 741–742.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, R. H., & Moore, J. D. (1981). Human kin recognition by olfactory cues. Physiology and Behavior, 27, 493‒495.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Porter, R. H., Balogh, R. D., Cernoch, J. M., & Franchi, C. (1986). Recognition of kin through characteristic body odors. Chemical Senses, 11, 389–395.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, R. H., Cernoch, J. M., & Balogh, R. D. (1985). Odor signatures and kin recognition. Physiology and Behavior, 34, 445–448.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Porter, R. H., Cernoch, J. M., & McLaughlin, F. J. (1983). Maternal recognition of neonates through olfactory cues. Physiology and Behavior, 30, 151–154.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Remedios, J. D., Chasteen, A. L., Rule, N. O., & Plaks, J. E. (2011). Impressions at the intersection of ambiguous and obvious social categories: Does gay + Black = likable? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1312–1315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rendall, D., Vasey, P. L., & McKenzie, J. (2008). The Queen’s English: An alternative, biosocial hypothesis for the distinctive features of “gay speech.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 37, 188–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, D. R., & Mullen, B. (2003). Isaac, Ishmael, and Janus: Past and future lessons regarding the ethnic categorization of faces. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, 1129–1147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rieger, G., Linsenmeier, J. A., Gygax, L., & Bailey, J. M. (2008). Sexual orientation and childhood gender nonconformity: Evidence from home videos. Developmental Psychology, 44, 46–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roberts, S. C., Gosling, L. M., Spector, T. D., Miller, P., Penn, D. J., & Petrie, M. (2005). Body odor similarity in noncohabiting twins. Chemical Senses, 30, 651–656.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. B. (1982). A simple, general purpose display of magnitude of experimental effect. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 166–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudd, N. A. (1996). Appearance and self-presentation research in gay consumer cultures: Issues and impact. Journal of Homosexuality, 31, 109–134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O. (2011). The influence of target and perceiver race in the categorization of male sexual orientation. Perception, 40, 830–839.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2008a). Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50-ms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1100–1105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2008b). The face of success: Inferences from Chief Executive Officers’ appearance predict company profits. Psychological Science, 19, 109–111.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2010). Democrats and Republicans can be differentiated from their faces. PLoS ONE, 5, e8733.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2011). Judgments of power from college yearbook photos and later career success. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 154–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B. Jr., & Macrae, C. N. (2007). Us and them: Memory advantages in perceptually ambiguous groups. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 687–692.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B. Jr., & Macrae, C. N. (2008). Accuracy and awareness in the perception and categorization of male sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1019–1028.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., & Hallett, K. C. (2009). Female sexual orientation is perceived accurately, rapidly, and automatically from the face and its features. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1245–1251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rule, N. O., Garrett, J. V., & Ambady, N. (2010a). On the perception of religious group membership from faces. PLoS ONE, 5, e14241.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Garrett, J. V., & Ambady, N. (2010b). Faces and places: Geographic environment influences the ingroup memory advantage. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 343–355.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Ishii, K., Ambady, N., Rosen, K. S., & Hallett, K. C. (2011). Found in translation: Cross-cultural consensus in the accurate categorization of male sexual orientation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1449–1507.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Macrae, C. N., & Ambady, N. (2009). Ambiguous group membership is extracted automatically from faces, Psychological Science, 20, 441–443.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Rosen, K. S., Slepian, M. L., & Ambady, N. (2011). Mating interest improves women’s accuracy in judging male sexual orientation. Psychological Science, 22, 881–886.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rule, N. O., Tskhay, K. O., Brambilla, M., Riva, P., Andrzejewski, S. A., & Krendl, A. C. (2015). The relationship between anti-gay prejudice and the categorization of sexual orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 77, 74–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Samochowiec, J., Wänke, M., & Fiedler, K. (2010). Political ideology at face value. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1, 206–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skorska, M. N., Geniole, S. N., Vrysen, B. M., McCormick, C. M., & Bogaert, A. F. (2015). Facial structure predicts sexual orientation in both men and women. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44, 1377–1394.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, M. S., Kish, B. J., & Crawford, C. B. (1987). Inheritance of wealth as human kin investment. Ethology and Sociobiology, 8, 171–182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stern, C., West, T. V., Jost, J. T., & Rule, N. O. (2013). The politics of gaydar: Ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104, 520–541.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sternberg, R. J., & Smith, C. (1985). Social intelligence and decoding skills in nonverbal communication. Social Cognition, 3, 168–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sylva, D., Rieger, G., Linsenmeier, J. A., & Bailey, J. M. (2010). Concealment of sexual orientation. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 141–152.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tabak, J. A., & Zayas, V. (2012). The roles of featural and configural face processing in snap judgments of sexual orientation. PloS ONE, 7: e36671.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Todorov, A., Mandisodza, A. N., Goren, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science, 308, 1623–1626.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tsay, C. J. (2013). Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 14580–14585.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tskhay, K. O., & Rule, N. O. (2013). Accuracy in categorizing perceptually ambiguous groups: A review and meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17, 72–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tskhay, K. O., & Rule, N. O. (2015). Emotions facilitate the communication of ambiguous group memberships. Emotion, 15, 812–826.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tskhay, K. O., Feriozzo, M. M., & Rule, N. O. (2013). Facial features influence the categorization of female sexual orientation. Perception, 42, 1090–1094.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tskhay, K. O., Xu, H., & Rule, N. O. (2014). Perceptions of leadership success from nonverbal cues communicated by orchestra conductors. The Leadership Quarterly, 25, 901–911.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valentova, J. V., Kleisner, K., Havlíček, J., & Neustupa, J. (2014). Shape differences between the faces of homosexual and heterosexual men. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 43, 353–361.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Valentova, J., Rieger, G., Havlíček, J., Linsenmeier, J. A., & Bailey, J. M. (2011). Judgments of sexual orientation and masculinity–femininity based on thin slices of behavior: A cross-cultural comparison. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40, 1145–1152.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weisfeld, G. E., Czilli, T., Phillips, K. A., Gall, J. A., & Lichtman, C. M. (2003). Possible olfaction-based mechanisms in human kin recognition and inbreeding avoidance. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 85, 279–295.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wong, E. M., Ormiston, M. E., & Haselhuhn, M. P. (2011). A face only an investor could love: CEOs’ facial structure predicts their firms’ financial performance. Psychological Science, 22, 1478–1483.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zebrowitz, L. A., Montepare, J. M., & Lee, H. K. (1993). They don’t all look alike: Individuated impressions of other racial groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 85–101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zebrowitz, L. A., & Montepare, J. M. (2006). The ecological approach to person perception: Evolutionary roots and contemporary offshoots. In Schaller, M., Simpson, J. A., & Kenrick, D. T. (Eds.), Evolution and social psychology (pp. 81–113). New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×