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We examined whether, even at zero acquaintance, observers accurately infer others’ social network positions—specifically, the number and patterning of social ties (e.g., brokerage—the extent to which a person bridges disconnected people) and the trait impressions that support this accuracy. We paired social network data ( n = 272 professional school students), with naive observers’ ( n = 301 undergraduates) judgments of facial images of each person within the network. Results revealed that observers’ judgments of targets’ number of friends were predicted by the actual number of people who considered the target a friend (in-degree centrality) and that perceived brokerage was significantly predicted by targets’ actual brokerage. Lens models revealed that targets’ perceived attractiveness, dominance, warmth, competence, and trustworthiness supported this accuracy, with attractiveness and warmth most associated with perceptions of popularity and brokerage. Overall, we demonstrate accuracy in naive observers’ judgments of social network position and the trait impressions supporting these inferences.
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Exploring the Representational Structure of Trait Knowledge Using Perceived Similarity Judgments
A large body of past work has sought to identify the underlying dimensions that capture our trait knowledge of other people. However, the importance of particular traits in determining our overall impressions of others is not well understood, and different traits may be fundamental for impressions of famous versus unfamiliar people. For instance, we may focus on competence when evaluating a famous person, but on trustworthiness when evaluating a stranger. To examine the structure of overall impressions of famous people and of unfamiliar people, we probed the contributions of 13 different trait judgments to perceived similarity judgments. We found that different sets of traits best predicted perceived similarity between famous people versus between unfamiliar people; however, the relationship between each trait and perceived similarity generalized to some extent from famous people to unfamiliar people, suggesting a degree of overlap in the structure of overall impressions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1943862
- PAR ID:
- 10387316
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social Cognition
- Volume:
- 40
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0278-016X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 549 to 579
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2022.40.6.549
