Evaluating the actions of others

We make decisions about the characteristics of other people from their actions.  We decide that someone is aggressive if they yell, make rude comments, and try to push people around.  Often, though, a specific behavior is ambiguous.  It is not entirely clear what it signals.  For example, if someone goes skydiving, he might be adventurous or he might be reckless.  How do you decide?

One factor that influences the way you evaluate other people is the concepts you are already thinking about.  That is, if you are already thinking about danger, then that active concept can affect your interpretation of someone’s behavior.  The way this works is a bit complicated, though, as described in a paper in the July, 2010 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Marlone Henderson and Cheryl Wakslak. 

They looked at the effects of active concepts and distance on evaluation of people’s behavior.  Quite a bit of work (some of which I have described in previous entries) suggests that when people think about things that are near to them in space or time, they tend to think about them much more specifically than when they think about things that are far away from them in space or time.  So, if you find out that someone is skydiving in a town nearby, you are more prone to think about the specific aspects of strapping on a parachute and jumping out of a plane than if they are going to skydive in a city far away.  When they are far away, you treat the action abstractly.

Henderson and Wakslak suggested that the concepts you are thinking about are much more likely to have an effect on your evaluation of someone’s actions when you are thinking about their actions specifically than when you are thinking about them only generally. 

In one study, they got people to think about recklessness (which is a negative trait) or adventurousness (which is a positive trait) by having them do a word search puzzle that had lots of words that related to either to being reckless (like dangerous and cautious) or to being adventurous (like exciting and bravery).  After doing the word search people evaluated a person shown in a picture skydiving.  That person was described as either skydiving in a nearby town or across the country. 

When the person was skydiving nearby, then people had a more positive evaluation of them when they were thinking about adventurousness than when they were thinking about recklessness.  Their active concepts had no reliable influence on their evaluations when they person was skydiving far away.   So, active concepts only affect the interpretation of actions when you are thinking about someone specifically. 

So what effects your evaluation of someone when they are far away?  Henderson and Wakslak also did a study in which they had people give their general attitude toward another behavior that could be thought of as reckless or adventurous (riding a motorbike).  They found that this general attitude did not affect people’s evaluation of someone motorbiking nearby, but it did have a reliable effect on their evaluation of someone motorbiking far away.  So, when someone is mentally distant from you, then you tend to use your general attitudes to evaluate them.

This research is also related to work on stereotypes.  Stereotypes are a general attitude about a group.  When someone is psychologically distant from you, then you often use your stereotypes to evaluate them.  However, when someone is psychologically close to you, then you tend to evaluate them based on their specific actions.  On the positive side, that means that if you hold a negative stereotype about a group, that will not affect your evaluation of people close to you.  On the negative side, the positive characteristics of people who are close to you and are also part of a stereotyped group will not make you think better of the group in general. 

For example, there is a widespread stereotype that women are worse at math than men.  You might know a lot of women who are quite good at math.  Because those women are psychologically close to you, however, their math ability may not affect your general impression that women are bad at math.  Ultimately, combating stereotypes requires thinking generally about a group and recognizing that there is no basis for a general attitude that you hold.    

Contrast makes you ideal in other people’s eyes

When you think about members of a group, you often evaluate how good a member of that group they are.  And that evaluation matters.

For example, when people go to the shelter to adopt a puppy, they are trying to decide whether there is a dog there they want to take home with them.  Some people go hoping to find a particular kind of dog, but many end up evaluating dogs based on whether they seem like good examples of the dog category.  What kind of information goes into this evaluation?

Lots of research on categorization going back 50 years suggests that there are two different ways that people might determine how good something is as a member of a category.

Sometimes, people form a prototype of a category.   A prototype is an average member of the category.  For example, for a category like birds, you may have a prototype.  The prototypical bird is small, has feathers, sings, and flies south in the winter.  A good example of a bird is one that is similar to this prototype like a robin or a sparrow.  Birds that are very different from this average member like ostriches, penguins, and emus, are bad examples of birds.

Other times, people form ideals.  An ideal is a particularly good category member.  For example, for a category like diet foods, you might evaluate examples based on how good they are compared to the ideal diet food, which tastes great and has very few calories.  Interestingly, you may never have seen this ideal diet food, but you still use it to evaluate category members.

A paper by Tyler Davis and Brad Love from the University of Texas published in the February, 2010 issue of Psychological Science the circumstances that lead people to form prototypes or ideals. 

They find that a crucial factor in the formation of categories is whether you are contrasting the category to others while you are creating it. 

Sometimes, you learn categories by just focusing on the category itself.  For example, when you see birds flying in the sky or sitting in a tree in your yard, you are looking at the bird and watching its behavior.  You are probably not that interested in trying to contrast birds with squirrels or dogs.  Because you are learning about birds without contrasting them with other categories, you will tend to form a prototype for that category.

When you learn a category by contrasting it with some other category, then you tend to create an ideal to make it easiest to form the contrast.  For example, diet foods are contrasted with normal foods, so you tend to identify diet foods based on a particular ideal, which has very few calories. 

These authors go further to say that you form an ideal only for those aspects of the category that you are trying to contrast with some other category.  For all other aspects of that category, you have a prototype.  Because you are contrasting diet foods with non-diet foods, you think of them as having very few calories.  However, diet foods are not really distinguished from other foods based on the style of food (say Italian food or Mexican food), so for dimensions of food like style or spiciness you still have a prototype. 

So, what happens to people who go to the shelter to adopt a dog?  You tend to learn about dogs the same way you learn about birds.  That is, you probably don’t learn about dogs by contrasting them with other animals.  So, you probably have a prototype representation of dogs.  As a result, the dogs you think of as particularly good dogs are ones that are close to the average dog (like a lab or a golden retriever). 

Contrast makes you ideal in other people’s eyes

When you think about members of a group, you often evaluate how good a member of that group they are.  And that evaluation matters.

For example, when people go to the shelter to adopt a puppy, they are trying to decide whether there is a dog there they want to take home with them.  Some people go hoping to find a particular kind of dog, but many end up evaluating dogs based on whether they seem like good examples of the dog category.  What kind of information goes into this evaluation?

Lots of research on categorization going back 50 years suggests that there are two different ways that people might determine how good something is as a member of a category.

Sometimes, people form a prototype of a category.   A prototype is an average member of the category.  For example, for a category like birds, you may have a prototype.  The prototypical bird is small, has feathers, sings, and flies south in the winter.  A good example of a bird is one that is similar to this prototype like a robin or a sparrow.  Birds that are very different from this average member like ostriches, penguins, and emus, are bad examples of birds.

Other times, people form ideals.  An ideal is a particularly good category member.  For example, for a category like diet foods, you might evaluate examples based on how good they are compared to the ideal diet food, which tastes great and has very few calories.  Interestingly, you may never have seen this ideal diet food, but you still use it to evaluate category members.

A paper by Tyler Davis and Brad Love from the University of Texas published in the February, 2010 issue of Psychological Science the circumstances that lead people to form prototypes or ideals. 

They find that a crucial factor in the formation of categories is whether you are contrasting the category to others while you are creating it. 

Sometimes, you learn categories by just focusing on the category itself.  For example, when you see birds flying in the sky or sitting in a tree in your yard, you are looking at the bird and watching its behavior.  You are probably not that interested in trying to contrast birds with squirrels or dogs.  Because you are learning about birds without contrasting them with other categories, you will tend to form a prototype for that category.

When you learn a category by contrasting it with some other category, then you tend to create an ideal to make it easiest to form the contrast.  For example, diet foods are contrasted with normal foods, so you tend to identify diet foods based on a particular ideal, which has very few calories. 

These authors go further to say that you form an ideal only for those aspects of the category that you are trying to contrast with some other category.  For all other aspects of that category, you have a prototype.  Because you are contrasting diet foods with non-diet foods, you think of them as having very few calories.  However, diet foods are not really distinguished from other foods based on the style of food (say Italian food or Mexican food), so for dimensions of food like style or spiciness you still have a prototype. 

So, what happens to people who go to the shelter to adopt a dog?  You tend to learn about dogs the same way you learn about birds.  That is, you probably don’t learn about dogs by contrasting them with other animals.  So, you probably have a prototype representation of dogs.  As a result, the dogs you think of as particularly good dogs are ones that are close to the average dog (like a lab or a golden retriever). 

Unrealistic optimism about problem drinking is dangerous.

An important part of everyone’s self-concept is a sense of how we compare to others in our behaviors.  A common observation is that many people are overly optimistic in their judgments about themselves relative to others.  For example, on average, people think they are more likely to be successful in business than others, or to be less likely to suffer from serious illnesses than others.  Not everyone can be more successful in business than others, of course, so somebody in that sample must be being too optimistic.

What is the effect of this optimism on behavior?

It is likely that being overly optimistic can have many different effects on behavior depending on the kind of behavior.  In this post, I want to focus on the influence of optimism on drinking.  Amanda Dillard, Amanda Midboe, and William Klein reported an interesting study in the November, 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in which they followed a group of college students for one and a half years.

Students were asked about whether they thought they were more or less likely to be at risk for drinking problems than their peers.  They were also asked about a number of problem drinking behaviors they might have experienced during that semester (including getting sick, blacking out, and missing class.  They were also asked about the amount they typically drank.  In three follow-up questionnaires given every six months, they were asked additional questions about their drinking behavior.

The first question is whether there were people who were unrealistically optimistic?  The answer to that question was clearly yes.  There was a group of people who felt that they were at low risk for drinking problems, yet those people did drink more than their peers.  These people were unrealistically optimistic.  Not everyone was unrealistically optimistic.  There was another group of realists who either did not drink much and correctly felt that they were at low risk for drinking problems or drank substantially but believed they were at risk for drinking problems.

The study then compared the realists to the unrealistic optimists.  The unrealistic optimists were more likely to experience negative events as a result of drinking than the realists in all of the followup periods. Six months after their initial assessment, the unrealistic optimists experienced 20% more negative episodes than the realists, and by the following year, they were experiencing 54% more negative episodes.

There are many reasons why the unrealistic optimists experience so many more alcohol problems than their peers who are realistic about their drinking.  For example, the unrealistic optimists may pay less attention to the consequences of their drinking than the realists in order to maintain their self-concept that they are not problem drinkers.  In addition, the unrealistic optimists may not be as good as the realists at recognizing the potential dangers of drinking.

So, if unrealistic optimism can lead to bad behaviors and bad consequences, why are some people unrealistically optimistic?  One reason is that this optimism may make people feel better in the short-run.  Those people who are unrealistically optimistic are not likely to be worried that their drinking behavior poses a long-term problem, and so they will experience little anxiety about their drinking.  People who are realistic about drinking may have more anxiety about drinking.

In the end, though, at least for behaviors that can have negative consequences like smoking, risky sex, or excessive drinking, it is probably best to be realistic about the dangers of these behaviors.