Perceptions of the impact of negatively valued characteristics on social interaction

Abstract

24 female undergraduates were led to believe that they were perceived as physically deviant in the eyes of an interactant when in fact they were not. Following a brief discussion, they commented on those aspects of the interactant's behavior that appeared to be linked to the deviance. Ss who thought that they possessed negatively valued physical characteristics found strong reactivity to the deviance in the behavior of their interactant, whereas those with a more neutrally valued characteristic did not. An expectancy/perceptual bias explanation is advanced to account for these results, although experimental demand is also a plausible interpretation. Study 2, with 50 male and female Ss, reaffirmed that both the expectancy and the demand explanations were plausible. Study 3 with 30 female Ss used a new set of instructions devised to test the competing explanations. Results strongly undermine a demand interpretation of the original results. In Study 4, with 32 female Ss, persons who had observed the behavior of the interactants in Study 1 via videotape also perceived greater reactivity to an imputed negative form of deviance than to a neutral one. Data support the notion that the results of Studies 1 and 3 reflect the operation of an expectancy/perceptual bias mechanism and tend to rule out a self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)