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Visual communication and impression formation
Author(s) -
Kemp N. J.,
Rutter D. R.,
Dewey M. E.,
Harding A. G.,
Stephenson G. M.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
british journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.855
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 2044-8309
pISSN - 0144-6665
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8309.1984.tb00622.x
Subject(s) - psychology , impression formation , impression , perception , face perception , face (sociological concept) , quality (philosophy) , cognitive psychology , social psychology , social perception , sensory cue , visual perception , computer science , linguistics , philosophy , epistemology , neuroscience , world wide web
Although it is widely believed that visual cues play an important part in person perception, the experimental literature is inconclusive. Two issues in particular remain unresolved: whether visual information affects participants in conversations in the same way it affects observers; and how the accuracy, quality, and confidence of impressions are related to one another. The purpose of the present experiment was to explore both issues, by incorporating participants and observers in one design, and examining all three aspects of impressions at once. Participants were video‐recorded in pairs, either face‐to‐face or over an audio‐only link, and the recordings were subsequently played to observers under conditions of sound and vision, vision only, or sound only. There were several differences in confidence estimates between participants and observers, but there was no evidence for either accuracy or quality effects. In addition, there was no evidence that observers were affected by whether or not they had visual information, or that face‐to‐face and audio participants differed in the impressions they created. It is concluded that visual cues play a smaller part in impression formation than has generally been supposed.