Judging Social Behavior Using "Thin Slices"

In our daily lives we make judgments regarding other people intuiti\~ely, unwittingly, and rapidly. A fleeting glimpse or a mere glance lead to evalu-ative judgments of others. Such judgments have important consequences. They influence whom we sit next to on the subway whom we hire for a job. and sometimes even whom we mam! Thus, as employers: within a minute into a job i n t e ~ e w we decide that we have found the ideal candidate. .As employees, within a minute of meeting a.future boss. we decide that we should start perusing the employment advert~se-ments. How accurate are these judg-ments? Is the candidate really ideal and is the boss really a n ogre? Social psvchologists have long been interested in issues relating to judgmen-tal accuracy. ,And for a long time social ps!~chologists concluded. based on innovative and intriguing research. that human beings are not v e n good judzes. Our judgments are prone to a depressing assortment of errors and biases. TO name just a few, we tend to be insensitive to the base rates of a condition in the population, to ignore information regarding the representativeness of samples, and to rely on judgmental heuristics that can be shown to lead to uninformed and poor decis~ons. Preceding and parallel to the work on judgment and decision mahng, another line of research sugested that people (and even animals) can be quite accurate in m a h n g certain rypes of judgments. For example, personality and social psvchologists found that people are quite good at judging certain aspects of others' personality and these judgments can be accurate at predicting certain variables such as extrover-sion even when there is absolutely no interaction between the targets and raters-when impressions are based on five-minute video clips of the targets. Furthermore, research on expectancy effects documented very clearl! [hat people and even animals accurately can sense the subtle. unstated expectations that other people have of them and behave according to those expectations. Systematic studies show!ed that people can accurately pick up and interpret cues from the nonverbal behavior of others. In the light of this research, it seemed surprising and paradoxical that social psychologists were lamenting the inaccurac!~ of social and perceptual judgments. T h e difference between the two streams of \\.ark, of course. \\,as the domain being examined-judgments regarding abstract information and judgments regarding other people. In this article we …