Certain personality traits appear to spread virally throughout a group, but is attitude towards other people among them? New research from Northwestern University set out to explore whether we can acquire attitudes towards other people from the various nonverbal signals other people direct at them
“This is important because often we are not explicitly thinking about the nonverbal signals that people display,” the researchers explain. “So we could be picking up messages from the nonverbal signals in our environment that we are not even aware of.”
The authors discovered that when volunteers were shown a silent video of people interacting, they were quickly able to adopt the attitudes towards certain individuals in those clips based upon nothing more than the nonverbal signals given off towards them. Indeed, they were able to pick up on both attitudes they were explicitly aware of and their implicit attitudes towards those people.
“This means that people were quicker to pair the individual who received positive nonverbal signals with good things, than the individual who received negative nonverbal signals,” the authors explain. “This was especially interesting because most of our participants did not think that the nonverbal signals that were displayed toward the individuals in the videos influenced their attitudes. Only about 30% of people indicated that how the individuals were treated influenced their attitudes toward them.”
Contagious attitudes
The ability for viewers to pick up attitudes from nonverbal signals was significant, not least because the researchers deliberately edited the videos to ensure that the targets of these nonverbal signals all responded in the same way, regardless of the signals they received.
The researchers believe this means that any contagion in attitude can only be down to the nonverval signals themselves rather than the responses of recipients to them.
“This has important implications for how people make sense of the nonverbal messages that they are exposed to in everyday life. These findings suggest that when we see people being less friendly toward one individual relative to another, we often attribute the unfriendliness to the target. Believing that we like them less because they do not seem to be very friendly, when in fact, it is others who were not very friendly to them,” they explain.
The findings suggest that these subconscious clues can help to mold our attitudes towards people, even when we begin an encounter with a largely neutral stance. The authors believe this has important consequences for our understanding of how biases emerge towards certain social groups, even at a very young age.
