Unlike the rocks around us, we spontaneously and immediately form impressions of the people around us, making inferences from the way they behave or appear. When seeing a person walk down the street, for example, you are immediately able to tell their gender and about how old they are. From whether that person is male or female, or old or young, you will likely assume a host of other things about what that person is like. As the person nears, you might also have a sense of how friendly or trustworthy that person seems. How are you able to do this? A long tradition of research on person perception shows that people can automatically perceive social categories, and also make surprisingly accurate judgments about other people’s personalities from limited information (Ambady & Weisbuch, 2010; Macrae & Quadflieg, 2010). The majority of this work describes how our visual perceptions allow us to categorize others and form impressions of their personalities. Yet is visual perception the only way we “perceive” people? New research demonstrates that other sensations, for example smell, taste and touch, originating from sources unrelated to a person perceived, can nonetheless influence how we perceive people.

Embodied cognition

People can’t help but slot others into social categories, and immediately form impressions of other people. Thus, knowledge of social categories and what people are like is constantly used. Traditional work in person perception suggests that this knowledge—which links learned categories of people (e.g., gender, race, age) with attributes that ostensibly describe features of those groups (e.g., stereotypes)—is stored in long term memory, similar to how files are stored on a computer’s hard drive. Yet such “files” would only contain descriptions of people, and link to other files; none would contain actual sensory, bodily information (e.g., what a person looks or sounds like), but only re-descriptions of this information. The emerging field of embodied cognition, however, suggests that knowledge is based, in part, in bodily sensation (Barsalou, 2008). For example, the simple sight of a hammer produces a partial activation of the muscles used when handling a hammer (Chao & Martin, 2000; Tucker & Ellis, 2001). This occurs because our mental representation of a hammer is not a set of symbols stored somewhere in the brain (the way a computer would represent what a hammer is like), but instead includes specific sensory and motor experiences associated with the use of a hammer (such as how a hammer feels, and the actions used when handling one).

Although abstract concepts are intangible and have no obvious associated sensory or embodied states (the way a hammer does), they can also be embodied through the use of metaphors (Barsalou, 2008; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). For example, the concept “importance” is described by the metaphor “having weight.” This metaphor is not merely linguistic: Participants who hold a heavy versus light clipboard judge a variety of items as more important (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009). Thus, it seems that people do not only use language to metaphorically describe something important as “heavy,” but that people actually think metaphorically about importance. They metaphorically match their concept of importance to sensations of weight, and this helps people think about abstract concepts like the importance of a decision, describing it as a “weighty matter.” There are many such examples of abstract concepts being embodied, including time, morality and secrets (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010; Lee & Schwarz, 2010; Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008; Slepian, Masicampo, Toosi, & Ambady, 2012; Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006; for a review see Meier, Schnall, Schwarz, & Bargh, 2012). However, until recently, an embodied perspective on person perception has not been taken. As described above, humans are a uniquely social species and person perception is a special case of perception. Thus applying embodied cognition theory to person perception is likely to bring valuable insights to both fields of study, with potential everyday applications.

Bodily sensations and person perception

Studies of person perception have discovered that many motivational and emotional factors influence the impressions we form of others (see Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), and recent studies demonstrate that physical sensations also influence how people are perceived. Experiencing physical warmth leads others to seem interpersonally warm and socially close (Williams & Bargh, 2008; IJzerman & Semin, 2009), experiencing physical roughness leads others to seem less socially coordinated (Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh, 2010), smelling fishy smells makes others seem more suspect (unlikely to cooperate; Lee & Schwarz, 2012) and making hostile gestures (e.g., extending the middle finger) makes others seem more hostile (Chandler & Schwarz, 2009). Simple metaphors like “good is up” also influence how people are perceived; when learning positive information about another person, people remember this information better if they are moving upwards at the same time (Palma, Garrido, & Semin, 2011). Even how one perceives oneself can be influenced by sensations. For example, tasting a sweet candy can make people feel that they themselves are more kind and sweet (Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, & Robinson, 2012). These findings refine our previous understanding of person perception. Past work has only considered prior knowledge and other people’s perceptual cues (i.e., what they look like) as information to inform judgments, for example how dark someone’s skin is to judge race, how long someone’s hair is, or the shape of someone’s face to judge gender, or the position of someone’s mouth or eyes to judge internal states like emotion (Cloutier, Mason, & Macrae, 2005; Maddox, 2004; Slepian, Weisbuch, Adams, & Ambady, 2011). Yet, this recent work demonstrates that perceivers’ own sensations influence their impressions of others.

Impression formation

Think about a fundamental social judgment—whether someone is trustworthy or not. People effortlessly judge others as trustworthy or untrustworthy, and this has a variety of consequences, such as how you treat that person, or think about them (Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 1998; Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008; Rule, Slepian, & Ambady, 2012).

Judgments of trustworthiness should particularly be influenced by physical sensations and movement as trust implies that a person can be approached, whereas distrust implies a person should be avoided. Approach and avoidance are regarded as fundamental dimensions of behavior. That is, the most basic action you can make is whether to move toward something or away from something. Across the animal kingdom, this is a fundamental action, and so for humans it might have an influence upon an everyday part of social life, impression formation. Indeed, in a recent study (Slepian, Young, Rule, Weisbuch, & Ambady, 2012) we found that when experiencing motor movement of approach, new people are judged as more trustworthy, whereas when experiencing motor movement of avoidance, new people are judged as more untrustworthy. In that study, just the briefest experience (a few seconds) of approach movement (by only temporarily activating arm muscles used when pulling something toward oneself) made other people seem especially trustworthy. And likewise, briefly activating the muscles used when pushing something away made people seem untrustworthy. Another study demonstrated the reverse relationship. Upon sight of a trustworthy face, relative to an untrustworthy face, people’s bodies were subsequently in a state of approach: It was especially easy to make an approach motion after seeing a trustworthy face, and easy to make an avoidance motion after seeing an untrustworthy face. This work suggests perhaps that whether you are leaning forward or backward when meeting someone could influence how trustworthy they seem, as trustworthiness judgments are intertwined with approach and avoidance movements.

Social categorization

Considering that we are inherently a social species and on a daily basis must make sense of the information from the complex social world we live in, we hypothesized that social categorical knowledge might also be embodied (Slepian, Weisbuch, Rule, & Ambady, 2011). For instance, one of the largest trait differences between males and females is tenderness, and perceivers bring the extremes of this trait to mind when they think of males (as “tough”) and females (as “tender”; Feingold, 1994). Tough and tender also describe opposing forms of sensory experience (i.e., the sensations experienced when handling hard and soft objects). Perhaps, then, those sensations that are metaphorically related to knowledge about social stereotypes provide a foundation for such categorical thinking. Indeed, we found that sensations influence gender categorization. Experiencing sensations of hardness by squeezing a hard ball, or pressing down hard on paper, led perceivers to categorize sex-ambiguous faces as male, whereas experiencing soft sensations led perceivers to more often categorize the same faces as female. Simply experiencing sensations of hardness led faces to actually look more masculine, and experiencing sensations of softness led faces to look more feminine. In these studies, sensory experience changed the visual perception of gender.

We also examined just how far this effect would extend, and tested whether other social categories might be embodied in this way (Slepian, Rule, & Ambady, 2012). Other social categories are metaphorically related to hard and soft sensations. For instance, American Republicans tend to show greater support for capital punishment and aggressive military action: political stances associated with being “hard” or “tough” (American National Election Studies, 2005). Democrats, in contrast, are more likely to support policies regarded as “softer,” such as social and economic security (e.g., universal health care and affirmative action policies; American National Election Studies, 2005).

Likewise, scholars in the natural sciences are described as “hard” scientists, whereas scholars in the social sciences and humanities are thought of as “soft” (Hedges, 1987; Storer, 1967). Across four studies, we found that the relationship between sensation and person perception extends to these other social groups. Experiencing hard (versus soft) sensations led male and female faces to be more often categorized as Republicans than Democrats, and it also led male professors to be more often categorized as physicists than historians. The meaning of hard and soft traits, however, was found to be context specific. For example, while hard politicians were perceived as tough and unwavering, hard scientists were seen as rigorous and precise. Soft politicians, in contrast, were seen as agreeable and tender, and soft scientists were seen as imprecise and flexible. Interestingly, then, these metaphorically hard and soft social categories rely upon two distinct metaphors, demonstrating that different properties of the same sensation can be metaphorically related to different, although similar, concepts. Relating a stereotypically resistant, firm, and unyielding Republican to sensations of hardness metaphorically resembles the experience of resistance when handling a hard object. Relating a stereotypically precise and exact hard scientist to sensations of hardness metaphorically resembles the experience of the rigid boundaries of a hard object. Thus sensations can be metaphorically mapped onto different social traits, but in contextually specific ways.

Hard and soft sensations are not the only bodily states that influence social categorization. How you move, more generally, can influence social categorization. For instance, moving your arm fluidly can lead you to think more fluidly, allowing you to think more broadly and flexibly (Slepian & Ambady, 2012). Thus, fluid movement can influence how fluidly you think about something. Based on this idea, we examined whether fluid movement would influence how people categorize others by race (Slepian, Wesibuch, Pauker, Bastian, & Ambady, in press). People often think about race in a rigid way. For example, people often categorize someone as belonging to a single racial category (e.g., Black) who actually belongs to several social categories (i.e., is biracial, e.g., Black/White; see Peery & Bodehausen, 2008). We found that moving one’s arm fluidly, relative to rigidly, led participants to categorize racially-ambiguous faces more often as biracial, demonstrating fluid thinking about race from fluid movement. In sum, everyday activities from how fluidly you move to how hard you press on something such as when typing on a keyboard or exercising can influence how you see other people.

Accurate perceptions

Traits including extraversion, conscientiousness, interpersonal warmth, and self-esteem can all be perceived accurately from a brief glimpse of someone (see Ambady & Weisbuch, 2011). People’s appearance and nonverbal behavior can actually provide a better indicator of what they are like than what they say (Weisbuch, Slepian, Clarke, Ambady, & Veenstra-Van der Weele, 2010). Thus, surprisingly little information is needed to accurately perceive information about another person. People can even accurately judge others when the stakes are high. For example, from the way professional poker players move when placing bets, people can accurately guess how good their hand is—not every time, but better than they would by random guessing (Slepian, Young, Rutchick, & Ambady, in press).

Can bodily states influence accurate perceptions of other people? In the studies discussed earlier, bodily states led to person perception biases (e.g., seeing others as Republican or Democrat, regardless of their actual political affiliation), but it turns out that bodily states can also influence the accuracy of impressions. For example, when women have higher fertility (i.e., when they are near peak ovulation), they are more attuned to reproduction-relevant or sexually-relevant cues including (for heterosexual women) greater attention to masculine features and wearing more attractive clothing (Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, & Schloerscheidt, 2002; Haselton, Mortezaie, Pillsworth, Bleske-Recheck, & Frederick, 2007). Thus, the biological state of increased fertility seems to lead to an enhanced sexual interest, and thus we predicted that this would lead heterosexual women to be more accurate in judging male sexual orientation (which is necessary for finding a mate). Indeed, as heterosexual women neared peak ovulation, they were better at accurately perceiving male, but not female, sexual orientation from merely observing faces (Rule, Rosen, Slepian & Ambady, 2011). Similar results were found when a mating interest was promoted by reading a story. From these studies discussed above, we can see that sensory and biological states influence how people are perceived, whether they judge others as male or female, Republican or Democrat, biracial or monoracial, and whether they can accurately perceive someone’s sexual orientation.

Conclusion

A long line of work has examined how people think about social categories and how people make impressions of others. When someone walks toward you on the street, we know what visual, emotional and motivational factors will influence how you perceive that person. New research is demonstrating that your own bodily state can also influence how you perceive people, whether you think they are trustworthy, what their political affiliation or profession is, and even their race, gender and sexual orientation. Everyday experiences such as how hard you press down on something or whether you lean forward or backward can influence how you see the people around you.

References