Causes and Effects of Variation in Behavior Perception

对于心理学的几个领域来说，人们如何组织和理解包含在另一个人连续或持续的行为流中的信息是一个非常重要的问题。这些学科包括社会、认知和临床，以及其他学科，如社会学、传播学和政治学，这些学科的重点也涉及与社会行动和互动的性质有关的问题。尽管如此，关于行为知觉问题的理论和研究却相对较少。本研究的总体目标是进一步阐明行为知觉过程的本质，同时确立其在各种心理现象中的突出作用。更具体地说，将探索个体如何将另一个人正在进行的行为划分或利用为有意义的行动的几个原因和影响。最初的一组研究考察了感知者将行为序列划分成的动作的数量(即，他们的利用率)与他们随后对该序列的动作的相关细节的记忆之间的关系。第二组研究考察了使用率和因果归因之间的关系。最后一组研究考察了使用率和情感之间的关系。这些研究将利用实验和统计(即路径分析)程序来检验从最近的理论和数据中得出的假设。这个项目的结果将产生关于人们获取、保留和利用社会信息的方式的新的和重要的知识。这项研究对大量借鉴社会知觉/认知文献的各种心理健康模型具有重要意义。

The problem of how people come to organize and comprehend the information contained in another person's continuous or ongoing stream of behavior is an issue that is of fundamental importance to several areas of psychology. These include social, cognitive, and clinical as well as to other disciplines such as sociology, communication, and political science whose focus is also concerned with issues related to the nature of social action and interaction. Despite this fact relatively little theory and research has been devoted to the behavior perception problem. The overall goal of this research is to further illuminate the nature of the behavior perception process and at the same time establish its prominent role in a variety of psychological phenomena. More specifically, several causes and effects of variation in how an individual divides or utilizes another person's ongoing behavior into meaningful actions will be explored. An initial set of studies examines the relationship between the number of actions perceivers divide a behavior sequence into (i.e., their utilization rate) and their subsequent memory for the action.related details of that sequence. A second set of studies examines the relationship between utilization rate and causal attribution. A final set of studies examines the relationship between utilization rate and affect. The studies will make use of experimental as well as statistical (i.e., path analytic) procedures to test hypotheses derived from recent theory and data. The results of this project will yield new and important knowledge concerning the manner in which people acquire, retain, and utilize social information. The research has important implications for various models of mental health that draw heavily on the social perception/cognition literature.