Accuracy in social perception: contributions of facial and vocal information.

The validity of social perceptions was assessed on the basis of facial or vocal information.Specifically, impressions of stimulus persons' power and warmth were obtained on the basis of either a facial photograph or a voice recording.These were compared with the stimulus persons' self-reports along the same dimensions.Face-and voice-based impressions did predict self-view.The specific facial and vocal characteristics that mediated these links were also considered.Potential mechanisms that may yield the match between self-perceptions and impressions based on nonverbal cues are discussed.As people navigate their way through their social environment, a wealth of information is continually made available to them.During the past two decades, research in the area of person perception has mainly been focused on describing the kinds of errors that people are inclined to make whdn processing social information, as well as elucidating the causal mechanisms that yield those biases.In the rush to identify the conditions under which people may be wrong, however, psychologists seem to have forgotten that social perceivers also do, at least on occasion, manage to get things right.In fact, some researchers have suggested that when allowed to function in an environment more naturalistic than that characteristic of the typical person perception experiment, social perceivers are much more competent than the literature would lead one to expect (e.g., Berry, 1990a;Funder, 1987;McArthur & Baron, 1983).Within some domains of social perception, there has recently been a refreshing shift toward investigating the extent to which social perceivers are accurate in their judgments.One line of this work focuses on people's ability to detect the dispositional properties of others in lieu of extensive behavioral information.For example, Kenny and his associates (Albright, Kenny, & Malloy, 1988;Kenny, Horner, Kashy, & Chu, 1990) asked previously unacquainted college students to make "in person" ratings of one another's personality traits.Participants were found to demonstrate substantial agreement in their judgments of a particular target person's traits.Moreover, the impressions formed in these first encounters predicted self-ratings along a variety of dimensions.Using a similar methodology, Watson (1989) also found associations between self-and stranger ratings.Funder and Colvin (1988) reported greater than chance Portions of these data were presented at the Nags Head Conference on Interaction Process and Analysis, Nags Head, North Carolina, June 1989.