Fundamental questions in behavior observation: Amount and overlap of information, sequence effects and perceiver-induced consistency

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Daniel Leising
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273683842

Although behavior observation plays an important role in many branches of social science, several fundamental questions in regard to this method remain yet to be answered. The present study comprises an innovative research designs that makes it possible to answer these questions: (1) Information overlap: Do different perceivers have to observe the exact same behaviors of a person in order to arrive at similar judgments about that person, or does it suffice if they judge the same person, but different behaviors? (2) Sequence effects: Will judgments of a person's behavior agree better with one another, and with external validity criteria, if they were calibrated by observing the behavior of other persons first? Do observers tend to avoid extreme judgments in the early stages of a sequence of judgments? (3) Perceiver-induced consistency: To what extent does the trans-situational consistency of behavior judgments by the same perceiver reflect the actual stability of the characteristics of the target person (as opposed to the perceiver's tendency to make his/her perceptions consistent with one another)? (4) Amount of information: Is is possible to replicate the finding that relatively accurate person judgments are possible based on very limited behavioral information (i.e., six brief situations, on average)? And (how) does this change if all judgments are provided by the same person? To address these questions, we will implement a strictly controlled research design in which the behavior of 200 persons in each of 20 standardized situations is videotaped and then judged by observers at zero acquaintance (i.e., the observers have no other information about the targets and do not interact with them either). A crucial element of the research design is the random assignment of observers to one of two groups: In one group, the same observer judges the same person across various situations, in the other group, an observer judges different persons in the same situation. In addition, the extent to which different observers are exposed to the same or different behavioral information about a target, and the order in which that information is presented, are experimentally manipulated. The study will make an important contribution to our understanding of behavior observation, and thus enable a more efficient use of that technique in future research. Above all, the study makes it possible to investigate the validity of some central yet untested tenets of the most influential models of person perception.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants