0.3 Individuals and their situations

What if a researcher were able to manipulate and control the beliefs of the perceiver, allow perceiver and target to interact with each other, and observe the impact of the perceiver's beliefs on the actual behavior of the target? He or she might observe that, when perceivers interact with targets whom they believe (erroneously, as a result of the experimental manipulation) to have friendly and sociable natures, those targets actually come to behave in friendly and sociable fashion. If so, the researcher would have witnessed an instance of the impact of events in the individual (here, the perceiver's beliefs) on events in the individual's social situation (here, the target's behavior).

People influence the people they interact with directly and the other people around them. They do so because humans are intelligent, verbal beings - they form beliefs and ideas about other people and this cognitive process possibly gets communicated and transferred to them.

Indeed, it has been possible to investigate experimentally the processes by which an individual's conceptions of other people exert powerful channeling influences on subsequent social interaction between the individual and other people. Actions of the individual based upon preconceived notions about other people can and do cause the behavior of other people to confirm and validate even erroneous and highly stereotyped conceptions of other people. The processes of behavioral confirmation, by which an individual's beliefs about the social world may create their own social reality, have been documented in diverse interpersonal domains.

So, even though people's beliefs about other people may be completely wrong, they still tend to have an influence. That makes sense if you consider that there is no real 'right' or 'wrong' when it comes to labeling people - it is all subjective. Anyone's opinion, no matter how invalid, is going to be a possible option. Anyone could be like anything, no one is completely set into a fixed, easily understood personality type. Personality is so dynamic that it could easily come under the influence of many different types of opinion.

For example, in one investigation of behavioral confirmation processes in social interaction, Snyder, Tanke and Bersheid2 investigated the impact of stereotyped conceptions of physical attractiveness (i.e., "beautiful people are good people") on the unfolding dynamics of social interaction and acquaintance processes. They arranged for pairs of previously unacquainted individuals to interact in an acquaintance situation (a telephone conversation) that had been constructed to allow them to control the information that one member of the dyad (the perceiver) received about the physical attractiveness of the other individual (the target). In anticipation of the forthcoming interaction, perceivers fashioned erroneous images of their specific discussion partners that reflected general stereotypes about physical attractiveness. Perceivers who anticipated physically attractive partners expected to interact with comparatively sociable, poised, humorous, and socially adept individuals. By contrast, perceivers faced with the prospect of getting acquainted with relatively unattractive partners fashioned images of rather unsociable, awkward, serious, and socially inept creatures. Moreover, perceivers had very different patterns or styles of interaction for targets whom they perceived to be physically attractive and those they perceived to be physically unattractive. These differences in self-presentation and interaction style, in turn, elicited and nurtured behavior in the targets that were consistent with the perceivers' initial stereotypes. Target who were perceived (unbeknownst to them) to be physically attractive actually came to behave in a friendly, likable, and sociable manner. This behavioral confirmation was discernible even by outside listeners who knew nothing of the actual or perceived physical attractiveness of the targets.