Taylor Elam, second year PhD student, has recently presented her master’s thesis defense presentation titled, “I’ll Believe it When I See it: Assessing the Differences in Perceptions of Moral Behavior”.
Elam begins by explaining the idea of person perception, which is the general tendency to form impressions of others which ties into impression formation. However, regardless of whether perceptions are accurate, we create meaning from them that lead to response behaviors. We measure these perceptions in 3 categories: Morality (assessment of virtue), Sociability (someone’s general inclination to connect with others), and Competence (capability of achieving goals).
Once these impressions are formed, they are then updated when integrating new evidence on the target’s morality, which may connote to a tipping point of when our perceptions change whether positive or negative; However, literature has found that it is easier to “tip” negatively with new information.
With that, Taylor has chosen to explore the question: How much positive or negative change do we need to see in someone’s behavior in order to alter our impression of them? She hypothesized that participants will tip their impressions the soonest when they watch increases in immoral behaviors (positive to negative) than when they read about increases in moral behaviors (negative to positive).
Participants were presented with 3 different modalities of viewing a moral and immoral vignette: reading, videos, and a list of behaviors. After running a mixed-model ANOVA, Taylor found results that partially supported hypothesis 1 as there were significant group differences in morality perceptions found only for moral to immoral behavior change.
This study has implications for a deeper understanding of negativity bias in impression change which has implications for the judicial system, politics, and even law enforcement. Future directions include a manipulation check analysis or possibly mood as a third variable.
We are extremely excited to see Taylor complete her research and progress through her degree!
FF-TIP LAB 