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People can transmit a lot more than just bugs to each other: Mood, emotions, and, according to a new study, attitudes, both positive and negative, can also be passed along. But even more interesting, and telling, is that people can absorb an attitude toward an individual without actually receiving any information from the individual. Worse, we're pretty sure we have.
The new paper, from Northwestern University, opens with this anecdote to set up the issue:
“Imagine boarding a crowded subway train and noticing that others on the train seem to be distancing themselves from one specific person. The message suggested by their nonverbal behavior is that there is something wrong with this person. But upon observation, the person appears ordinary enough and you are unable to come up with an explanation for this apparent avoidance. Nonetheless, the nonverbal behavior of the other passengers may lead you to feel uneasy around this person relative to others on the train.”
The study tries to get at how this transfer of information happens, and how the receiver forms his or her opinion of what’s happening. And interestingly, where previous research has found that these types of reactions rely largely on preexisting biases (e.g., race), the new one looks at whether attitudes can also be transmitted in the absence of these biases (and finds they can).
The team had people watch video clips taken from the TV show Ally McBeal, where the title character was reacting positively or negatively to another character. (The researchers held race constant, and the participants, who were mainly college students, were too young to have seen the show when it aired, so didn't have biases against characters or actors.) Nothing was said in the clips—all the information the actor conveyed about the other individual (the target) was nonverbal. In follow-up experiments, the researchers created clips that were even clearer, by digitally editing the actors’ facial expressions and using multiple characters instead of just one. They also edited the facial expression of the target to be totally neutral, so that no information could be gleaned from the target himself.
The team found repeatedly that when participants watched the clips, they formed corresponding opinions of the target—they rated him as more likable when the actors were reacting positively toward him, and less likable when they reacted negatively.
But the interesting part of the study is this: when the participants were asked what they’d based their responses on, they largely believed it was the target’s responses that had informed their opinions. However, since the researchers had edited the targets’ expressions to be totally neutral, this couldn’t be the case—they must have been basing it on the sentiments expressed by the actors.
"Even though we edited the videos so that the targets of nonverbal signals all responded in the same way — whether they received positive or negative nonverbal signals, and only the nonverbal signals that they received varied, a substantial proportion of participants attributed their attitudes to the targets' behavior," said study author Allison Skinner in a statement. "This has important implications for how people make sense of the nonverbal messages that they are exposed to in everyday life. These findings suggest that when we see people being less friendly toward one individual relative to another, we often attribute the unfriendliness to the target. Believing that we like them less because they do not seem to be very friendly, when in fact, it is others who were not very friendly to them."
The main results of the study aren’t totally surprising: We get clues about the world around us from the people around us. On the off change that they’re right, we trust their opinions. What the study really reveals is the degree to which we misattribute the source of the information, believing that it comes from the object, rather than the observer. And this misattribution can become dangerous, particularly in some of the ongoing situations in this country and abroad right now. The study reminds us to pause when we're forming opinions—and really pause when relying on the opinions of others.
