Role Model
Christopher Olivola et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research suggests that voting in elections is influenced by appearance-based personality inferences (e.g., whether a political candidate has a competent-looking face). However, since voters cannot objectively evaluate politicians' personality traits, it remains to be seen whether appearance-based inferences about a characteristic continue to influence voting when clear information about that characteristic is available. The authors examine the impact of appearance-based inferences for a characteristic that is well known about candidates: their political affiliation. Across two studies, the authors show that U.S. candidates facing conservative electorates benefit from looking more stereotypically Republican than their rivals (controlling for gender, ethnicity, and age). In contrast, no relationship between political facial stereotypes and voting is found for liberal electorates (using identical controls). The authors further show that this contrast between liberal and conservative electorates has more to do with individual-level differences between liberal and conservative voters than with macro-level differences between liberal and conservative states.
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The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun
Simon Laham, Peter Koval & Adam Alter
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Names are rich sources of information. They can signal gender, ethnicity, or class; they may connote personality characteristics ranging from warmth and cheerfulness to morality. But names also differ in a much more fundamental way: some are simply easier to pronounce than others. Five studies provide evidence for the name-pronunciation effect: easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) are judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names. Studies 1-3 demonstrate that people form more positive impressions of easy-to-pronounce names than of difficult-to-pronounce names. Study 4 finds this effect generalizable to ingroup targets. Study 5 highlights an important real-world implication of the name-pronunciation effect: people with easier-to-pronounce surnames occupy higher status positions in law firms. These effects obtain independent of name length, unusualness, typicality, foreignness, and orthographic regularity. This work demonstrates the potency of processing fluency in the information rich context of impression formation.
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Yalda Uhls & Patricia Greenfield
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In line with Greenfield's (2009) theory of social change and human development, current popular preadolescent TV shows suggest that fame, an individualistic goal, is an important and achievable aspiration (Uhls & Greenfield, 2011). Such messages may be particularly salient for preadolescents, ages 10-12. This study used focus groups and mixed analytic methods (qualitative and quantitative) to examine how popular media, passive and interactive, are interpreted by preadolescents and how their interpretations relate to their media practices and future goals. Quantitative analysis revealed that fame was the number one value, selected as the most important value for participants' future goals significantly more frequently than expected by chance. Qualitative analysis of focus group discourse suggested that (a) youth absorb messages in their media environment regarding fame as a future goal and (b) their interpretations of these messages highlight the importance and value of public recognition. Enacting the value of fame, the majority of preadolescent participants use online video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube) to seek an audience beyond their immediate community.
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The Power of Pictures: Vertical Picture Angles in Power Pictures
Steffen Giessner et al.
Media Psychology, Winter 2011, Pages 442-464
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom suggests that variations in vertical picture angle cause the subject to appear more powerful when depicted from below and less powerful when depicted from above. However, do the media actually use such associations to represent individual differences in power? We argue that the diverse perspectives of evolutionary, social learning, and embodiment theories all suggest that the association between verticality and power is relatively automatic and should, therefore, be visible in the portrayal of powerful and powerless individuals in the media. Four archival studies (with six samples) provide empirical evidence for this hypothesis and indicate that a salience power context reinforces this effect. In addition, two experimental studies confirm these effects for individuals producing media content. We discuss potential implications of this effect.
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Erik Lindqvist
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the relationship between height and leadership. Using data from a representative sample of Swedish men, I document that tall men are significantly more likely to attain managerial positions. An increase in height by 10 centimeters (3.94 inches) is associated with a 2.2 percentage point increase in the probability of holding a managerial position. Selection into managerial positions explains about 15 percent of the unconditional height wage premium. However, about half of the height-leadership correlation is due to a positive correlation between height and cognitive and noncognitive ability.
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Social ecology of similarity: Big schools, small schools and social relationships
Angela Bahns, Kate Pickett & Christian Crandall
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, January 2012, Pages 119-131
Abstract:
Social ecologies shape the way people initiate and maintain social relationships. Settings with much opportunity will lead to more fine-grained similarity among friends; less opportunity leads to less similarity. We compare two ecological contexts - a large, relatively diverse state university versus smaller colleges in the same state - to test the hypothesis that a larger pool of available friendship choices will lead to greater similarity within dyads. Participants in the large campus sample reported substantially more perceived ability to move in and out of relationships compared to participants in the small colleges sample. Dyads were significantly more similar on attitudes, beliefs, and health behaviors in the large campus than in the small colleges sample. Our findings reveal an irony - greater human diversity within an environment leads to less personal diversity within dyads. Local social ecologies create their own "cultures" that affect how human relationships are formed.
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When They're Sixty-Four: Peer Effects and the Timing of Retirement
Kristine Brown & Ron Laschever
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of peers on an individual's likelihood of retirement using an administrative dataset of all retirement-eligible Los Angeles teachers for the years 1998-2001. We use two large unexpected pension reforms that differentially impacted financial incentives within and across schools to construct an instrument for others' retirement decisions. Controlling for individual and school characteristics, we find that the retirement of an additional teacher in the previous year at the same school increases a teacher's own likelihood of retirement by 2 percentage points. We then explore some possible mechanisms through which this effect operates.
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Richard Cook et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 February 2012, Pages 780-786
Abstract:
A compelling body of evidence indicates that observing a task-irrelevant action makes the execution of that action more likely. However, it remains unclear whether this 'automatic imitation' effect is indeed automatic or whether the imitative action is voluntary. The present study tested the automaticity of automatic imitation by asking whether it occurs in a strategic context where it reduces payoffs. Participants were required to play rock-paper-scissors, with the aim of achieving as many wins as possible, while either one or both players were blindfolded. While the frequency of draws in the blind-blind condition was precisely that expected at chance, the frequency of draws in the blind-sighted condition was significantly elevated. Specifically, the execution of either a rock or scissors gesture by the blind player was predictive of an imitative response by the sighted player. That automatic imitation emerges in a context where imitation reduces payoffs accords with its 'automatic' description, and implies that these effects are more akin to involuntary than to voluntary actions. These data represent the first evidence of automatic imitation in a strategic context, and challenge the abstraction from physical aspects of social interaction typical in economic and game theory.
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Leadership under uncertainty: When leaders who are non-prototypical group members can gain support
David Rast et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social identity theory of leadership (Hogg & van Knippenberg, 2003) research confirms that group members support group prototypical leaders more strongly than non-prototypical leaders. Two studies examined the prediction derived from uncertainty-identity theory (Hogg, 2007) that this relationship between leader prototypicality and support weakens when group members have elevated self-related uncertainty, due to increased support for non-prototypical leaders. Student participants indicated their level of uncertainty and their support for a prospective student leader who was prototypical or non-prototypical of students at their university-prototypicality was a between-subjects variable in Study 1 (N = 98), and a within-subjects variable in Study 2 (N = 132). As predicted, participants supported the prototypical leader more strongly than the non-prototypical leader, but this effect was significantly weakened (Study 2) or disappeared (Study 1) under uncertainty, due to a significant increase in support for the non-prototypical leader. Implications for empowerment of non-prototypical leaders are discussed.
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The Importance of Attributional Complexity for Transformational Leadership Studies
Peter Sun & Marc Anderson
Journal of Management Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Attributional complexity refers to the capability of discriminating and integrating dimensions related to social judgment in order to understand social behavior. While previous leadership research has examined the role of leader attributions, it has neglected the role of attributional complexity. We theorize and find support for a relationship between higher attributional complexity and transformational leadership behaviors, based on a sample of 100 leaders and their direct reports. Leaders, who were more complex in their social judgments, attributing complex external and internal causes to others' behaviors and actions, were seen as more transformational by their direct reports. Our findings suggest that attributional complexity is a construct that warrants consideration in future research on both transformational leadership and leadership attributions.
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Social selection and peer influence in an online social network
Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez & Jason Kaufman
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 January 2012, Pages 68-72
Abstract:
Disentangling the effects of selection and influence is one of social science's greatest unsolved puzzles: Do people befriend others who are similar to them, or do they become more similar to their friends over time? Recent advances in stochastic actor-based modeling, combined with self-reported data on a popular online social network site, allow us to address this question with a greater degree of precision than has heretofore been possible. Using data on the Facebook activity of a cohort of college students over 4 years, we find that students who share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another. Meanwhile, we find little evidence for the diffusion of tastes among Facebook friends - except for tastes in classical/jazz music. These findings shed light on the mechanisms responsible for observed network homogeneity; provide a statistically rigorous assessment of the coevolution of cultural tastes and social relationships; and suggest important qualifications to our understanding of both homophily and contagion as generic social processes.
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An Experimental Study of Homophily in the Adoption of Health Behavior
Damon Centola
Science, 2 December 2011, Pages 1269-1272
Abstract:
How does the composition of a population affect the adoption of health behaviors and innovations? Homophily - similarity of social contacts - can increase dyadic-level influence, but it can also force less healthy individuals to interact primarily with one another, thereby excluding them from interactions with healthier, more influential, early adopters. As a result, an important network-level effect of homophily is that the people who are most in need of a health innovation may be among the least likely to adopt it. Despite the importance of this thesis, confounding factors in observational data have made it difficult to test empirically. We report results from a controlled experimental study on the spread of a health innovation through fixed social networks in which the level of homophily was independently varied. We found that homophily significantly increased overall adoption of a new health behavior, especially among those most in need of it.
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Academic Achievement and Its Impact on Friend Dynamics
Jennifer Flashman
Sociology of Education, January 2012, Pages 61-80
Abstract:
Academic achievement in adolescence is a key determinant of future educational and occupational success. Friends play an important role in the educational process. They provide support and resources and can both encourage and discourage academic achievement. As a result, the friends adolescents make may help to maintain and exacerbate inequality if friends are sorted on the basis of academic achievement. These observations prompt the question: How does academic achievement affect the friendship ties made? Using data from the high schools in the Add Health saturated sample, the author models network change using a stochastic actor-based Markov model for the co-evolution of networks and behavior. This model is carried out at the school level for each of the high schools included in the saturated sample. Results show that in the most typical American schools, similarity in academic achievement is an important and consistent predictor of friendship ties in a dynamic context. High-achieving students are more likely to extend ties to other high-achieving students, net of other sociodemographic, network, and proximity characteristics, while low-achieving students are more likely to extend ties to other low-achieving students. Adolescents respond to changes in academic achievement by changing their friendship ties.
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Eun-Ju Lee & Jeong-woo Jang
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies investigated (a) how public figures' interaction with their followers on social network sites (SNS) affects individuals' impressions about and attitudes toward them, and (b) how individuals' interpersonal orientation moderates such effects, if any. In Study 1, participants viewed either a famous actor's Twitter page or a news article merely relaying his Tweets. Exposure to the Twitter page (vs. news article) induced stronger feelings of actual conversation (i.e., social presence) among less affiliative individuals, whereas the reverse was true for more socially proactive ones. Social presence, in turn, facilitated parasocial interaction with the target and heightened the participants' willingness to watch his movie, with limited effects on their overall evaluation of the target. Study 2, which employed a lesser known local politician using a different microblogging service, replicated the advantage of SNS communication over the news article for socially reserved individuals, with no corresponding effect for more affiliative ones.
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Genetic Underpinnings of Transformational Leadership: The Mediating Role of Dispositional Hope
Sankalp Chaturvedi et al.
Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, November 2011, Pages 469-479
Abstract:
In this study, the authors investigate the extent to which dispositional hope mediates genetic influences on transformational leadership. Based on a sample of female twins (214 identical and 178 fraternal) from the Minnesota Twin Registry, results indicated that 53% of the variance in hope and 49% of the variance in transformational leadership were accounted for by genetic factors. After controlling for positive emotionality and negative emotionality, it was found that the genetic influence on transformational leadership was mediated by dispositional hope with the overlapping genetic factors explaining 20.8% of the total variance in transformational leadership.
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Further evidence that facial cues of dominance modulate gaze cuing in human observers
Benedict Jones et al.
Swiss Journal of Psychology, December 2011, Pages 193-197
Abstract:
Many studies have demonstrated a gaze-cuing effect in humans, whereby observers are quicker to respond to targets in locations cued by others' gaze direction than they are to respond to uncued targets. Although researchers have generally suggested that this gaze-cuing effect is unaffected by facial cues other than gaze direction, recent work has challenged this view: Both human and macaque observers demonstrate greater gaze cuing when viewing conspecifics' faces that possess physical cues associated with high dominance than when viewing those that possess physical cues associated with low dominance. In the current study, we tested for further evidence of dominance-contingent gaze cuing in women. We conducted a gaze-cuing experiment in which different individual female faces were used as cues and calculated the strength of the gaze-cuing effect for each face. Composite (i.e., average) faces manufactured from images of women who elicited particularly large gaze-cuing effects were perceived as more dominant than composites manufactured from images of women who elicited particularly small gaze-cuing effects. This result supports (1) the existence of dominance-contingent gaze-cuing in human observers and (2) the proposal that the gaze-cuing system is sensitive to facial cues other than gaze direction.
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Who syncs? Social motives and interpersonal coordination
Joanne Lumsden et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Interpersonal synchrony provides an important foundation for social interaction, with periods of temporal coordination leading to enhanced sociality. Moreover, synchronous actions are governed by the lawful physical principles of coordination dynamics, suggesting some degree of inevitability. However, both anecdotal and laboratory evidence indicates that not all individuals synchronize. Here we explored whether differences in social motives (i.e., social value orientation) influence the propensity to coordinate with others. The results revealed that individuals with a pro-social orientation spontaneously coordinated with a confederate to a greater extent than those with a pro-self orientation, regardless of whether such orientations were assessed as dispositional characteristics (Study 1) or were the result of a priming manipulation (Study 2). These findings have important implications for both coordination dynamics and prominent accounts of social exchange.
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The evolutionary basis of human social learning
T.J.H. Morgan et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 February 2012, Pages 653-662
Abstract:
Humans are characterized by an extreme dependence on culturally transmitted information. Such dependence requires the complex integration of social and asocial information to generate effective learning and decision making. Recent formal theory predicts that natural selection should favour adaptive learning strategies, but relevant empirical work is scarce and rarely examines multiple strategies or tasks. We tested nine hypotheses derived from theoretical models, running a series of experiments investigating factors affecting when and how humans use social information, and whether such behaviour is adaptive, across several computer-based tasks. The number of demonstrators, consensus among demonstrators, confidence of subjects, task difficulty, number of sessions, cost of asocial learning, subject performance and demonstrator performance all influenced subjects' use of social information, and did so adaptively. Our analysis provides strong support for the hypothesis that human social learning is regulated by adaptive learning rules.