Aggregating social behavior into person models: perceiver-induced consistency

ARRMA: An Integrative Theoretical and Mathematical Model of Assumed and Actual Dyadic Behavior

In dyadic interaction, do people share a common interpersonal reality? Each assumes the probable response of the other, observes the other's actual response, and assess the veracity of assumptions. Interpersonal theory stipulates that one's response invites a similar (e.g., smiling elicits smiling) or a dissimilar (e.g., dominance evokes submission) reciprocal response. Members' assumptions may be congruent or incongruent with the other's actual response. A model called ARRMA integrates this dyadic interplay by linking three conceptually and mathematically related phenomena: A ssumed R eciprocity, R eciprocity, and M etaperception A ccuracy. Typically studied independently, mathematical derivations reveal the necessity of considering their simultaneity. The theoretical logic of minimal ARRMA models at the individual (i.e., in multiple dyads) and dyadic (i.e., specific dyads) levels are developed, and are then generalized to the full ARRMA at each level. Also specified are statistical methods for estimating ARRMA parameters. ARRMA models shared and idiosyncratic interpersonal realities in dyads.

A situated cognition model for clinical reasoning performance assessment: a narrative review

Background Clinical reasoning performance assessment is challenging because it is a complex, multi-dimensional construct. In addition, clinical reasoning performance can be impacted by contextual factors, leading to significant variation in performance. This phenomenon called context specificity has been described by social cognitive theories. Situated cognition theory, one of the social cognitive theories, posits that cognition emerges from the complex interplay of human beings with each other and the environment. It has been used as a valuable conceptual framework to explore context specificity in clinical reasoning and its assessment. We developed a conceptual model of clinical reasoning performance assessment based on situated cognition theory. In this paper, we use situated cognition theory and the conceptual model to explore how this lens alters the interpretation of articles or provides additional insights into the interactions between the assessee, patient, rater, environment, assessment method, and task. Methods We culled 17 articles from a systematic literature search of clinical reasoning performance assessment that explicitly or implicitly demonstrated a situated cognition perspective to provide an "enriched" sample with which to explore how contextual factors impact clinical reasoning performance assessment. Results We found evidence for dyadic, triadic, and quadratic interactions between different contextual factors, some of which led to dramatic changes in the assessment of clinical reasoning performance, even when knowledge requirements were not significantly different. Conclusions The analysis of the selected articles highlighted the value of a situated cognition perspective in understanding variations in clinical reasoning performance assessment. Prospective studies that evaluate the impact of modifying various contextual factors, while holding others constant, can provide deeper insights into the mechanisms by which context impacts clinical reasoning performance assessment.

Considerations of Mutual Exchange in Prosocial Decision-Making

Research using economic decision-making tasks has established that direct reciprocity plays a role in prosocial decision-making: people are more likely to help those who have helped them in the past. However, less is known about how considerations of mutual exchange influence decisions even when the other party’s actions are unknown and direct reciprocity is therefore not possible. Using a two-party economic task in which the other’s actions are unknown, Study 1 shows that prosociality critically depends on the potential for mutual exchange; when the other person has no opportunity to help the participant, prosocial behavior is drastically reduced. In Study 2, we find that theories regarding the other person’s intentions influence the degree of prosociality that participants exhibit, even when no opportunity for direct reciprocity exists. Further, beliefs about the other’s intentions are closely related to one’s own motivations in the task. Together, the results support a model in which prosociality depends on both the social conditions for mutual exchange and a mental model of how others will behave within these conditions, which is closely related to knowledge of the self.

Comparatively salient: examining the influence of preceding performances on assessors' focus and interpretations in written assessment comments

Recent literature places more emphasis on assessment comments rather than relying solely on scores. Both are variable, however, emanating from assessment judgements. One established source of variability is "contrast effects": scores are shifted away from the depicted level of competence in a preceding encounter. The shift could arise from an effect on the range-frequency of assessors' internal scales or the salience of performance aspects within assessment judgments. As these suggest different potential interventions, we investigated assessors' cognition by using the insight provided by "clusters of consensus" to determine whether any change in the salience of performance aspects was induced by contrast effects. A dataset from a previous experiment contained scores and comments for 3 encounters: 2 with significant contrast effects and 1 without. Clusters of consensus were identified using F-sort and latent partition analysis both when contrast effects were significant and non-significant. The proportion of assessors making similar comments only significantly differed when contrast effects were significant with assessors more frequently commenting on aspects that were dissimilar with the standard of competence demonstrated in the preceding performance. Rather than simply influencing range-frequency of assessors' scales, preceding performances may affect salience of performance aspects through comparative distinctiveness: when juxtaposed with the context some aspects are more distinct and selectively draw attention. Research is needed to determine whether changes in salience indicate biased or improved assessment information. The potential should be explored to augment existing benchmarking procedures in assessor training by cueing assessors' attention through observation of reference performances immediately prior to assessment.

Inter-rater variability as mutual disagreement: identifying raters' divergent points of view

Whenever multiple observers provide ratings, even of the same performance, inter-rater variation is prevalent. The resulting 'idiosyncratic rater variance' is considered to be unusable error of measurement in psychometric models and is a threat to the defensibility of our assessments. Prior studies of inter-rater variation in clinical assessments have used open response formats to gather raters' comments and justifications. This design choice allows participants to use idiosyncratic response styles that could result in a distorted representation of the underlying rater cognition and skew subsequent analyses. In this study we explored rater variability using the structured response format of Q methodology. Physician raters viewed video-recorded clinical performances and provided Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise (Mini-CEX) assessment ratings through a web-based system. They then shared their assessment impressions by sorting statements that described the most salient aspects of the clinical performance onto a forced quasi-normal distribution ranging from "most consistent with my impression" to "most contrary to my impression". Analysis of the resulting Q-sorts revealed distinct points of view for each performance shared by multiple physicians. The points of view corresponded with the ratings physicians assigned to the performance. Each point of view emphasized different aspects of the performance with either rapport-building and/or medical expertise skills being most salient. It was rare for the points of view to diverge based on disagreements regarding the interpretation of a specific aspect of the performance. As a result, physicians' divergent points of view on a given clinical performance cannot be easily reconciled into a single coherent assessment judgment that is impacted by measurement error. If inter-rater variability does not wholly reflect error of measurement, it is problematic for our current measurement models and poses challenges for how we are to adequately analyze performance assessment ratings.

Rethinking Social Cognition in Light of Psychosis: Reciprocal Implications for Cognition and Psychopathology

The positive symptoms of psychosis largely involve the experience of illusory social actors and yet our current measures of social cognition, at best, only weakly predict their presence. We review evidence to suggest that the range of current approaches in social cognition is not sufficient to explain the fundamentally social nature of these experiences. We argue that social agent representation is an important organising principle for understanding social cognition and that alterations in social agent representation may be a factor in the formation of delusions and hallucination in psychosis. We evaluate the feasibility of this approach in light of clinical and non-clinical studies, developmental research, cognitive anthropology and comparative psychology. We conclude with recommendations for empirical testing of specific hypotheses and how studies of social cognition could more fully capture the extent of social reasoning and experience in both psychosis and more prosaic mental states.

PERSON: A General Model of Interpersonal Perception

A general theoretical model of interpersonal perception called PERSON (personality, error, residual, stereotype, opinion, and norm) is developed. This model reparameterizes a weighted-average model (WAM; Kenny, 1991; Kenny, Albright, Malloy, & Kashy, 1994) into six components. Two of those components refer to categorical information and 4 to behavioral information. Based on a formal model, for which parameters are estimatedfrom previous research studies, several implications are developed. The PERSON model can explain the low level of consensus in person perception, the fact that consensus does not increase with greater acquaintance, the strong stability of interpersonal judgment, the overconfidence effect, and the fact that short-term judgments are sometimes as accurate as long-term judgments. The PERSON model generally predicts that acquaintance is not as important in person perception as generally thought.

The Asymmetrical Perception of Men and Women

This study examines the individuation versus categorization of men and women. Several researchers have argued for structural status differences between men and women - men occupy societal positions of high status, and women positions of low status. This line of research predicts that male participants will individuate other men, but categorize women. Conversely, female participants will individuate men as well as women. In the present study, male and female participants were presented with eight stimulus persons, four men and four women, each described by four attributes. In addition, stimulus-category fit was manipulated such that the attributes were either stereotypical of the gender group they described or gender neutral. Information clustering in free recall and name-matching were main dependent measures. The results support the hypotheses and are discussed in terms of status differentials and contemporary theories of person perception.

The Things You Do: Internal Models of Others' Expected Behaviour Guide Action Observation

Predictions allow humans to manage uncertainties within social interactions. Here, we investigate how explicit and implicit person models-how different people behave in different situations-shape these predictions. In a novel action identification task, participants judged whether actors interacted with or withdrew from objects. In two experiments, we manipulated, unbeknownst to participants, the two actors action likelihoods across situations, such that one actor typically interacted with one object and withdrew from the other, while the other actor showed the opposite behaviour. In Experiment 2, participants additionally received explicit information about the two individuals that either matched or mismatched their actual behaviours. The data revealed direct but dissociable effects of both kinds of person information on action identification. Implicit action likelihoods affected response times, speeding up the identification of typical relative to atypical actions, irrespective of the explicit knowledge about the individual's behaviour. Explicit person knowledge, in contrast, affected error rates, causing participants to respond according to expectations instead of observed behaviour, even when they were aware that the explicit information might not be valid. Together, the data show that internal models of others' behaviour are routinely re-activated during action observation. They provide first evidence of a person-specific social anticipation system, which predicts forthcoming actions from both explicit information and an individuals' prior behaviour in a situation. These data link action observation to recent models of predictive coding in the non-social domain where similar dissociations between implicit effects on stimulus identification and explicit behavioural wagers have been reported.

Psychological-State Theories about Significant Others: Implications for the Content and Structure of Significant-Other Representations

Three studies tested a theory-based approach to significant-other representations. The central hypothesis was that perceivers are especially likely to possess lay theories to explain the responses of their significant others, and this is reflected in the content and structure of significant-other representations. Theories were defined in IF-THEN terms as beliefs about the psychological states (e.g., “IF Bill wants to make a good impression...”) that explain others' responses (e.g., “... THEN he acts friendly”). All three studies yielded evidence indicating that the content of significant-other representations is especially likely to include such psychological-state theories (PSTs). Study 3 assessed the internal structure of PSTs—specifically, the strength of the linkages between psychological-state IFs and the THENs they are believed to elicit—and showed that such linkages are particularly strong for PSTs about significant others. Overall, the findings add to the growing literature on the role of explanatory or lay-theoretical forms of knowledge in how perceivers make sense of the social world.

Group Entitativity and Social Attribution: On Translating Situational Constraints into Stereotypes

The research investigates the impact of group entitativity on social attribution. Perceivers confronted with a group high in entitativity more readily call on underlying essence to explain people's behavior. We adapted Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz's over attribution paradigm to a group setting. Participants were randomly selected to join a group of questioners, answerers, or observers in a quiz game. Unknown to the contestants, their group was presented to the observers as an entity or as an aggregate. As predicted, group entitativity promoted the use of dispositional attributions for the behavior of group members. These findings suggest that the explanation of group members' behavior is more likely to remain situation insensitive whenever perceivers share the naive theory that underlying features characterize the group. The discussion focuses on the impact of social attribution in the emergence of stereotypes and examines the role of subjective essentialism in social categorization and rationalization.

More consensus than idiosyncrasy: Categorizing social judgments to examine variability in Mini-CEX ratings

PURPOSE

Social judgment research suggests that rater unreliability in performance assessments arises from raters' differing inferences about the performer and the underlying reasons for the performance observed. These varying social judgments are not entirely idiosyncratic but, rather, tend to partition into a finite number of distinct subgroups, suggesting some "signal" in the "noise" of interrater variability. The authors investigated the proportion of variance in Mini-CEX ratings attributable to such partitions of raters' social judgments about residents.

METHOD

In 2012 and 2013, physicians reviewed video-recorded patient encounters for seven residents, completed a Mini-CEX, and described their social judgments of the residents. Additional participants sorted these descriptions, which were analyzed using latent partition analysis (LPA). The best-fitting set of partitions for each resident served as an independent variable in a one-way ANOVA to determine the proportion of variance explained in Mini-CEX ratings.

RESULTS

Forty-eight physicians rated at least one resident (34 assessed all seven). The seven sets of social judgments were sorted by 14 participants. Across residents, 2 to 5 partitions (mode: 4) provided a good LPA fit, suggesting that subgroups of raters were making similar social judgments, while different causal explanations for each resident's performance existed across subgroups. The partitions accounted for 9% to 57% of the variance in Mini-CEX ratings across residents (mean = 32%).

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that multiple "signals" do exist within the "noise" of interrater variability in performance-based assessment. It may be valuable to understand and exploit these multiple signals rather than try to eliminate them.

A Review and Critique of Partner Effect Research in Small Groups

The purpose of this review is to discuss the ways in which partner effects are examined in group contexts. We focus on social influence, as it is a common theme in group research from cognate fields such as communication, psychology, family studies, social psychology, and business. We elaborate on different conceptions of partner effects in our discussion of the social relations model (SRM), the actor–partner interdependence model (APIM), and the group actor–partner interdependence model (GAPIM), and provide a comprehensive review of the studies that have utilized these models to study groups. Following that, we discuss the ways in which partner effects research can improve our theoretical and empirical understanding of group processes.

Imagine all the people: how the brain creates and uses personality models to predict behavior

The behaviors of other people are often central to envisioning the future. The ability to accurately predict the thoughts and actions of others is essential for successful social interactions, with far-reaching consequences. Despite its importance, little is known about how the brain represents people in order to predict behavior. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants learned the unique personality of 4 protagonists and imagined how each would behave in different scenarios. The protagonists' personalities were composed of 2 traits: Agreeableness and Extraversion. Which protagonist was being imagined was accurately inferred based solely on activity patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex using multivariate pattern classification, providing novel evidence that brain activity can reveal whom someone is thinking about. Lateral temporal and posterior cingulate cortex discriminated between different degrees of agreeableness and extraversion, respectively. Functional connectivity analysis confirmed that regions associated with trait-processing and individual identities were functionally coupled. Activity during the imagination task, and revealed by functional connectivity, was consistent with the default network. Our results suggest that distinct regions code for personality traits, and that the brain combines these traits to represent individuals. The brain then uses this "personality model" to predict the behavior of others in novel situations.

Rater-based assessments as social judgments: rethinking the etiology of rater errors

BACKGROUND

Measurement errors are a limitation of using rater-based assessments that are commonly attributed to rater errors. Solutions targeting rater subjectivity have been largely unsuccessful.

METHOD

This critical review examines investigations of rater idiosyncrasy from impression formation literatures to ask new questions for the parallel problem in rater-based assessments.

RESULTS

Raters may form categorical judgments about ratees as part of impression formation. Although categorization can be idiosyncratic, raters tend to consistently construct one of a few possible interpretations of each ratee. If raters naturally form categorical judgments, an assessment system requiring ordinal or interval ratings may inadvertently introduce conversion errors due to translation techniques unique to each rater.

CONCLUSIONS

Potential implications of raters forming differing categorizations of ratees combined with the use of rating scales to collect categorical judgments on measurement outcomes in rater-based assessments are explored.

The Agreeableness Asymmetry in First Impressions: Perceivers' Impulse to (Mis)judge Agreeableness and How It Is Moderated by Power

Prior research shows that perceivers can judge some traits better than others in first impressions of targets. However, questions remain about which traits perceivers naturally do infer. Here, the authors develop an account of the “agreeableness asymmetry”: Although perceivers show little ability to accurately gauge target agreeableness in first impressions, they find that agreeableness is generally the most commonly inferred disposition among the Big Five dimensions of personality (agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and emotional stability). Using open-ended impressions based on photographs, videos, and face-to-face encounters, three studies show agreeableness as the most prevalently judged of the Big Five, although it is also poorly judged in both absolute and relative terms. The authors use interpersonal power to reveal an underlying mechanism. Manipulating the power of perceivers relative to targets substantially shifts impression content, suggesting that habitual interaction and relational concerns may partially explain perceiver's chronic interest in assessing agreeableness despite their limited ability to do so.

Perceptions of problem behavior in adolescents' families: perceiver, target, and family effects

Considerable research has focused on the reliability and validity of informant reports of family behavior, especially maternal reports of adolescent problem behavior. None of these studies, however, has based their orientation on a theoretical model of interpersonal perception. In this study we used the social relations model (SRM) to examine family members' reports of each others' externalizing and internalizing problem behavior. Two parents and two adolescents in 69 families rated each others' behavior within a round-robin design. SRM analysis showed that within-family perceptions of externalizing and internalizing behaviors are consistently due to three sources of variance; perceiver, target, and family effects. A family/contextual effect on informant reports of problem behavior has not been previously reported.

A social relations variance partitioning of dyadic behavior

The authors investigate the relative importance of actor and interaction partner as determinants of dyadic behavior. Using the social relations model (D. A. Kenny, 1994a; D. A. Kenny & L. La Voie, 1984), the authors estimate the variance attributable to each determinant plus the reciprocity of behavioral responses from 7 studies. The authors find evidence for moderate behavioral consistency in a person's behavior across interaction partners, little or no evidence that people consistently engender the same behavioral response from others, and preliminary evidence of unique responding to particular partners. They also consider several methodological issues concerning behavioral measurement as well as the implications of the results for the study of accuracy.