Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal led the quest to understand the limits of impression formation, and in a series of studies they demonstrated that observers make accurate personality and competency judgments using very “thin slices of behavior.” In their experiments, undergraduate raters watched brief, 30-sec video clips of teachers in the classroom, and evaluated the teachers on thirteen different variables, including likability, competence, warmth, honesty, and optimism. Notably, the audio on these video clips was removed, so that raters made their evaluations exclusively on the basis of non-verbal cues. Not only were the judgments of the teachers fairly consistent across raters, but they were also fairly accurate.
These appraisals, rendered after only half a minute of observation, were reliably predictive of the evaluation scores given to the teachers by students whom they had instructed for a full semester. In subsequent studies Ambady and Rosenthal examined judgments rendered after only ten seconds, and then after a mere two seconds. Even when given only two seconds of silent video, the raters made judgments that correlated reliably with end-of-semester evaluations made by the teachers' own students.
Two seconds of silent video may indeed seem like a very thin slice of behavior upon which to base an impression, but researchers have demonstrated that we can do well with far less. More recent investigations have demonstrated that a simple photograph of our favorite shoes provides enough data for strangers to judge our age, gender, income and attachment anxiety, and that a list of our top ten favorite songs reveals how agreeable and emotional stable we are.
But what if we reduce the information available to a mere series of dots, strung together to form a stick figure that depicts movement but nothing else? John Thoresen, Quoc Vuong, and Anthony Atkinson addressed this question in a series of experiments where participants judged personality traits on the basis of body movements alone. The scientists first videotaped male and female volunteers as they walked roughly 25 feet. From these videos, they created stick-figure depictions of each walker, eliminating all information about age, attractiveness, weight, clothing, race, and gender. The only information available to observers was the gait of the walker, conveyed in the form of a two-dimensional stick-figure.
Participants in these studies rated each stick-figure walker on six trait scales: adventurousness, extraversion, neuroticism, trustworthiness, warmth, and approachability. Two questions were addressed: First, were the impressions about the stick-figure walkers consistent across raters? Second, were they accurate?
Raters were in fact fairly reliable in their judgments: if one rater judged a walker to be adventurous and extraverted, it is likely that other raters did too. Despite the consensus in ratings, though, the impressions were not correct. The trait judgments made by raters did not align with the walkers' self-reports.
These findings are a bit puzzling. If the raters were wrong, why were their impressions so similar? What information were raters using to make their judgments that lead to such consistency? Thoresen and colleagues speculated that the raters may have tried to glean other (unseen) physical characteristics of the stick-figure walkers like gender, age, or health, and may have used those intuitions as the basis for their personality judgments. To test this possibility, Thoresen and colleagues thus asked new groups of raters to view the stick-figure walkers and guess various physical characteristics of the stick-figure walkers, like gender, attractiveness, age, and excitability.
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Add CommentSo, the college students in this group all think alike.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt never ceases to amaze me how easily and quickly people can dismiss a fascinating and complex set of observations about human social cognition. If the rest of the human race were as curious and imaginative as the people who post here we'd still be in the lower paleolithic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis seems absurd to me. A study for the obvious? Making personality assessments based on walking! What if the person is in pain? What if they have an injury? What if they have an ingrown toenail for gosh sakes?! Do these physical traits legitimately lend themselves to personality? I'd say it's just that 'ole ancient "selection of the fittest mate" instinct. All about sex and reproduction. And it leads to incredible bias. What's unfortunate is that youth does not understand this introspectively. How could they? They are in the throws of the instinctual sexual ritual. They lack perspective and insight. They should try to focus less on instinct and more on education. And study something more worthy of advancing civilization.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI really cannot believe the number of times "introverted" is misspelled in this article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExtroverted, rather.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislol, did you read the article? The point is that people come up with consistent theories about other people's personality traits, and that they agree (in some cases) with what the observed people self-report. It is immaterial if it is CORRECT or not, it is showing us something really interesting about social cognition and/or reasoning in humans. Of course it would be interesting to see how well these guesstimates correlate with standard psychological measures of personality too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am surprised this sort of thing gets funding when we have real problems to address.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you recognize that "the people who post here" are not a representative group, shouldn't you agree that a group of college psychology students isn't a representative group, either?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"If you recognize that "the people who post here" are not a representative group, shouldn't you agree that a group of college psychology students isn't a representative group, either?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow long will it take you to realize that THIS DOES NOT MATTER. The point of the paper isn't that it is a representative group. It is that ANY GROUP AT ALL of people will consistently report personality attributes to a stick figure and that they can ACCURATELY tell you what a person will report about his or her own personality from nothing but a picture or a pair of shoes.
EXPLAIN THIS. Furthermore, while some set of college students may not be entirely representative you're going to have to seriously stretch credibility to insist that they are all that unrepresentative of people in this country.
For you to simply dismiss this kind of work as uninteresting on the basis of such a questionable assertion is the problem. Really, open up your brain a little and think about it. If we dismissed every observation on such casual basis we REALLY WOULD still be in the stone age. It is only by seeing these things and thinking about them and devising more experiments, etc that we learn anything.
Extraversion is not a misspelling. It's just a variant spelling of extroversion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs all we already know; that science is an outcome of brain function.If science continue to ignore the ordinary and basic function of our brains that is intuition and common sense, we will step slowly toward the truth of our life.If our brain in general makes it's interpretations according to it's biological function which rely on experience, then we should be convinced and totaly trust it, otherwise we should not trust it in any other issue.The same is concerning the way of walking,since the brain is responsible for walking and for interpretation then we should rely on it's conclusion.Now, from my experience and observations of people walking , including people that I get to know their personality, I am convinced that there is a strong connection between personality and walking. In my opinion this is a much plausible fact of brain function.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@tharter - There are many possible reasons for the consistency of responses across participants tested within any group. That is, we are human and share the same general physical, emotional, intellectual, and instinctual drivers and experiences. The sky is up, the ground is down. Food and water are important, the sun is good. Etc, etc, etc. Therefore, we will often come to the same conclusions. Sounds psychic or mystical, right? Wrong, it's simply and expression of our shared existence. We are all pretty much copies of each other, and we are driven to make the same conclusions, over and over. Kind of Jungian.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSecondly, and sadly, we see ourselves as others see us. We accept others' bias as a definition of ourselves. We integrate those into our own self-assessment. If I have a lilt to my walk, I am treaty happy and perky. Therefore, I begin to believe I'm happy and perky. That's just a general example to make a point. Multiply this concept across the masses and it becomes a social phenomenon that we all buy into. For example -People who walk with a lilt are happy. Then we use it to define ourselves and conform to the expectations.
Finally, we are wired to bias based on our own experiences and experiences of those around us. How else could we know to avoid a lion on the plains? And we'd be stupid to treat every lion as a new entity. It takes only one to eat us alive. We can't afford not to be biased. Unfortunately, studies like this celebrate our bias and treat it as though it's an awesome attribute. In my mind it's a necessary evil and one to continually struggle against, not to embrace by wasting time with studies on how cool it is to observe bias in absurd ways.
Plain and simple, to answer your question "Explain this", it's because we are biased beings. Why study that? No reason to, we already know this.
Wow, again, all I can say is I'm happy that there are a lot more curious and less superficial minds out there studying the world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for the compliment. btw, until now, I've said nothing rude about you at all, yet you project me to be superficial. Introspective anyone? Why don't you focus on the topic and forget your personal bias about the commenter? On a relative scale of meaningful things to be curious about, studying one's gait does not merit. How about applying that curiosity to something of value. I'm truly all for curiosity, but practical application must follow.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOK, but I don't agree with you that "practical application must follow" for 2 reasons. 1st science is not the pursuit of practical applications, it is the pursuit of knowledge. 2nd none of us has a very good idea which things will produce useful and practical results, or how much insight this might bring.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFinally it isn't about GAIT at all. It is about social cognition. How does the brain process information and what sorts of information does it process and what sort of social information can it get out of it. What does this tell us about our ability to understand each other? There are all sorts of possible uses for this kind of information.
Of course this one tiny little study is not much, but frankly knowledge comes in tiny steps. 1000's of such experiments build up our understanding of what the world IS and then we can put it together and generalize and figure out how it works. The big leaps are rare. Don't be so eager to dismiss something like this just because it is a small step. Every journey begins with a single step.
First of all, thank you for disagreeing with my assessment without dismissing me. That type of disagreement I appreciate. And you're right, I should not so quickly dismiss a study that has already been done. It contains information.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe agree it's not about gait, and even the concept of curiosity isn't that relevant because the question has already been asked, the results pondered. But in my view the topic is really about bias. Bias should be the focus of topic and the study is merely another demonstration of bias, a trait that transcends our consciousness. This is an example of how bias affects us individually and socially as a group. I think it even demonstrates a feed back loop of bias in how it actually changes the way we view ourselves and how we behave as individuals groups. We can even add the word cognition and be consistent. The cognition of bias. But it all gets back to that thing we are all so familiar with in our everyday world and even rely upon. Bias.
Well, at least our positions are clarified, and they may not be as far apart as one would assume.
Yeah, that's cool. I think most of the time people are not so far off as they seem to think at first. :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not sure about the bias thing. I don't quite follow your reasoning there I guess. It seems to me that people were extracting some sort of information from even a photo of another person. Given that, presumably, the subjects reported various different personality types for different people they observed then clearly they're not biased to assigning specific ones all the time. They could be biased towards assigning specific ones to specific (physical) types of people, but then why do those people themselves report similar assessments of themselves?
Surely if for instance this was like some simple racial bias (all black people are untrustworthy or something and reported that way) then surely all black people don't think of themselves that way (believe me) so there'd be little, if any, correlation with self-reports by the people observed. Beyond that we can pretty safely assume people have a fairly accurate self-knowledge of various basic traits. I know if I'm outgoing, introverted, friendly, etc. People may not always be realistic about themselves, but its hard to believe they simply echo some arbitrary baseless opinions that other people have created purely on appearance. Thus SOMETHING is going on beyond any sort of 'bias' IMHO.
You're right, tharter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems that SI articles merely exist as opportunities for gang trolling.
It's important for commentors to add substance rather than indulge in unstudied criticism.
"Do I have a deep interest in psychology, ethology, or anthropology?" might be good requisite self-questioning for those who comment here.
It's not the best use of commentary to use SI columns for verbal combat. One can indulge in that in political or personal websites.
Extraversion is the common spelling in psychological texts, perhaps coming from Jung's first use. Extroversion is commonly used in US & pop psych. Before comment on this, one might have looked it up, if unfamiliar.
Now - evaluation is a necessary characteristic of social animals and predators. Millions of years of evolution have produced clear recognition of cues which may seem subtle or entirely overlooked by a human culture which has descended into verbal exposition, having lost or devalued this cognitive skill.
Many scientists have been dependent upon verbosity, ignoring the depth and array of nonverbal communication - intentional or inadvertent.
Dr/Professor May, as you see above,explores social/cognitive disabilities; the subject of communication is far more extensive.
We evolved from organisms which use chemical communication. Most species still depend upon molecular judgment - rhetoric does not confuse or deceive those species, whose perceptions are context-dependent and taken in holistically, through various senses.
The gray wolf has been often observed evaluating in what field biologists call "the conversation of death." For many years observers have attempted to analyze cues given by prospective prey in stillness, seeing choices made by the wolf, but not always understanding the source of decision, unless/until the answer is yes, and the wolves expose the weakness.
Do they assess determination? Posture is likely involved, muscle tension or tone, and many other factors.
Humans, especially females, have strong evolutionary reasons to evaluate; studies of their capacities have shown that females are quicker and more accurate than males in social assessments of males. I don't know, however, of cross-cultural studies in this case; they would be enlightening as to whether what was being observed so well was a matter of cultural externals, as opposed to psychological factors.
There's much literature on the evolutionary intersexual assessment battle, most of it observational, with little experiment on sensory specifics. This is a fertile area for further study.
Well said hanmeng and Michael M.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhenever I come across yet another article which draws sweeping conclusions about all human beings from a study of the reactions of teenagers and twentysomethings at a single university in the United States, I want to ask the researchers if they have done anything to find out if similar results have been found elsewhere.
The only way we can know if there are underlying patterns in all of us - not just the group being studied - is if we study newborn babies (and even then they'll have been influenced by what happened to them in the womb) or we look at as wide a range of people as possible in as wide a range of societies as possible, and we find what evidence we can of past societies as well, and therefore correct for as many different factors as possible which might account for the results.
Having said that, I know I do assume that the way somebody walks can suggest something about them. People who are fit and healthy and happy, in my experience, _will_ walk with a bounce in their step, and their backs straight, and their shoulders back, and their heads erect, facing the world. I'm less sure that I'd expect somebody's walk to reveal their underlying personality though, but just their current state of health, physical and emotional.
It's also worth pointing out that in misogynistic cultures women aren't expected to walk in a confident way. (Marge Piercy dramatises this to comic as well as satirical effect in the visionary 'Woman on the Edge of Time' http://margepiercy.com/portfolio-items/woman-on-the-edge-of-time/.) Far too many of us have internalised contempt for women and think that to be real women we have to act like drag queens, wear high-heeled shoes and cripple ourselves (just as Chinese women used to have their feet bound). I grew out of this dangerous rubbish when I got out of my teens, and I haven't worn high-heeled shoes since.
Other differences exist between groups with different power. Those with less power are expected to keep their heads down and keep out of the way of the rich and powerful...
In real life I could witness other facts than you have mentioned. Actualy it's so obvious that health either physical and mental affecting our walk. However I am convinced from real facts of observations and strong intuition that there is strong connection between way of walk and personality.Science that make queries about our behavior should not rely just on scientific data that are disconnected from real life.In order to reach the facts about our brains and behavior we must activate our intutions, otherwise we can easily stripe the real facts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs you have mentioned there are certain people who walk in certain way due to there corrent situation. This is True in general.But, our walk have more than one dimention.If you observe one population, you can observe a general similarity in all people's way of walk, but if you observe individuals, you will find a unique way of walk that is characterising only that person. Then there are multi-dimentional way to observe way of walking.Beside the basic difference in way of walking between men and women that is obviously and certainly coming out of different characters.
I'm still convinced it's instinctual bias that leads us to interpret gaits in similar ways. I'm also convinced that this natural bias present us with peer pressure with the goal of conformity. Therefore, bias and conformity are apposite sides of the same coin, inextricably linked. This study successfully demonstrate the bias. Now, look for the mechanisms that transform it to conformity. We do not have a 'personality', we are simply organisms responding predictably to the world around us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswhat if raters come from different cultures, which have totally different values?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps I'm wrongly using the term 'bias', and should be referring to 'evaluation' as mentioned by Michael M. His explanation is far better. But I'd like to add that 'evaluation' not only helps us interpret our environment, but ultimately influences our view of the world around us (in relation to ourselves) and influences how we fit in and how we conform (or fail to conform). Both as individuals and groups. That is the feedback or loop-back concept I was trying to introduce. So if I understand Michael's comment correctly, then this study supports the concept of evaluation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNice to have come across the article ,it makes a lot of sense,i am thinking of a redoing my walk style in the lines of the pendulum style (i.e.) walk with hip swaying left,and nicely proceed right (also thinking of stopping in the center with push back) hope this can help people judge me as extroverted -(somehow this has become the "In Thing" these days)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe study says SFA in many cases as some have a mobility disabilities. Personally in my case I also have certain psychological disabilities that complicate things even more.
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