Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality.

Abstract A perceiver's actions, although based upon initially erroneous beliefs about a target individual may channel social interaction in ways that cause the behavior of the target to confirm the perceiver's beliefs. To chart this process of behavioral confirmation, we observed successive interactions between one target and two perceivers. In the first interaction, targets who interacted with perceivers who anticipated hostile partners displayed greater behavioral hostility than targets whose perceivers expected nonhostile partners. Only when targets regarded their actions as reflections of personal dispositions did these behavioral differences in hostility persevere into their subsequent interactions with naive perceivers who had no prior knowledge about them. Theoretical implications of the behavioral confirmation construct for social perception processes are discussed.

[1]  R. Abelson.  Script processing in attitude formation and decision making. , 1976 .

[2]  H. Kelley,et al.  Social interaction basis of cooperators' and competitors' beliefs about others. , 1970 .

[3]  E. Goffman.  Stigma; Notes On The Management Of Spoiled Identity , 1964 .

[4]  R. Merton.  Social Theory and Social Structure , 1958 .

[5]  B. Werble.  Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. , 1966 .

[6]  T. Szasz,et al.  The Myth of Mental Illness , 1963, Mental Health.

[7]  P. F. Secord,et al.  An interpersonal approach to personality. , 1965, Progress in experimental personality research.

[8]  Stephen C. Jones,et al.  The self-fulfilling prophecy and interpersonal attraction , 1971 .

[9]  Ross Stagner,et al.  The Gullibility of Personnel Managers , 1958 .

[10]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Salience, Attention, and Attribution: Top of the Head Phenomena , 1978 .

[11]  Arthur Fink,et al.  Crime and the community , 1941 .

[12]  R. Nisbett,et al.  Behavior as seen by the actor and as seen by the observer , 1973 .

[13]  Ronald C. Dillehay,et al.  The Biased Questionnaire as an Instrument of Opinion Change. , 1970 .

[14]  G. Salancik.  Extrinsic attribution and the use of behavioral information to infer attitudes. , 1976 .

[15]  D. M. Kuhlman,et al.  Expectations of choice behavior held by cooperators, competitors, and individualists across four classes of experimental games. , 1976 .

[16]  H. Becker,et al.  Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. , 1964 .

[17]  D T Regan,et al.  Empathy and attribution: turning observers into actors. , 1975, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[18]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Point of view and perceptions of causality. , 1975 .

[19]  L. Ross.  The Intuitive Psychologist And His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process1 , 1977 .

[20]  E. Schur.  Labeling deviant behavior : its sociological implications , 1973 .

[21]  Secord Pf,et al.  An interpersonal approach to personality. , 1965 .

[22]  Roger E. Ulrich,et al.  Student Acceptance of Generalized Personality Interpretations , 1963 .

[23]  Paul E. Meehl,et al.  Wanted—a good cook-book. , 1956 .

[24]  Robert Rosenthal,et al.  Psychology of the Scientist: V. Three Experiments in Experimenter Bias , 1963 .

[25]  J. G. Holmes,et al.  The role of situational restrictiveness on self-fulfilling prophecies: A theoretical and empirical extension of Kelley and Stahelski's triangle hypothesis. , 1975 .

[26]  U. Neisser.  Cognition and reality: principles and implications , 1976 .

[27]  R. Klatzky.  Human Memory: Structures And Processes , 1975 .