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Predicting Unpredictability in People Running head: PREDICTING UNPREDICTABILITY IN PEOPLE This version submitted 12-31-05 to Sydney Symposium organizers The Social Prediction Dynamic: A Legacy of Cognition and Mixed Motives Oscar Ybarra University of Michigan Matthew C. Keller Virginia Commonwealth University Emily Chan Colorado College Jeffrey Hutsler, Stephen Garcia, , and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks University of Michigan (Words excluding abstract, references, and footnote, 5616) 1 Predicting Unpredictability in People 2 Abstract Social navigation involves not only predicting others but also how the object of prediction responds to the prospect of being figured out. Given the often-expressed frustration by social scientists that human behavior is less predictable than the topics studied by the "harder" sciences, it is surprising that the latter, to our knowledge, has not been considered in social psychology. We argue that when dealing with people, we many times are dealing with moving targets. Thus, we suggest that one way to understand and predict humans is by actually appreciating that many times they have a basic interest in not being sized up (e.g., by curious social scientists). However, people’s predictability should vary as a function of the social circumstances, with uncertain, contentious, and threatening social situations heightening, but more favorable and safe social situations reducing, people’s need to be opaque and unpredictable. (words, 142) Predicting Unpredictability in People 3 The Social Prediction Dynamic: A Legacy of Cognition and Mixed Motives Social scientists often lament that human behavior is less predictable than the topics studied by the “harder” sciences, ostensibly because many factors go into determining why people do the things they do. Normally, this unpredictability is treated as the “noise” or measurement error of social science studies. However, as some investigators have pointed out, such noise may reflect meaningful behavior in complex systems (Gilden, 2001) and has actually been modeled and used to inform theory in the physical and biological sciences (Miller, 1997). In this chapter we make this noise the centerpiece of our analysis. We put forth a theoretical rationale that holds that the trouble with predicting human behavior is partly due to a suite of behaviors that bias people away from wanting to be sized-up and predicted by others, especially in uncertain or contentious social circumstances. Thus, while research on theory of mind and related areas of person perception explore one side of the social prediction dynamic, we think that its complement, people’s reactions to being perceived and predicted, deserves equal attention. Social Pressures on Cognitive Evolution A fundamental social motive is the need to understand and predict other people’s behavior; this is what we all do, not just social scientists. By knowing others’ mental states, such as their intentions and desires, we can anticipate others’ actions. Thus, “good enough” guesses of others’ mental states should facilitate social interaction (Asch, 1952; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Heider, 1958; Roth & Leslie, 1991; Tagiuri, 1958; Whiten, 1997)1. However, smooth and coordinated social interaction is an outcome people should want from their interactions with kin, friends, and other trusted Predicting Unpredictability in People 4 individuals. However, the mental transparency that facilitates coordinated interaction is not something people want from their interactions with unknown or contentious parties who could potentially predict a person’s behaviors to the detriment of the predicted (social scientists may fall in this latter category). The concern people should have with predicting others, and as we will argue, with having others predict them, may be an outcome of primate brain evolution. In contrast to the idea that primate intelligence and primate brains evolved in response to ecological pressures (e.g., Clutton-Brock & Harvey, 1980; Gibson, 1986; Milton, 1988), other research indicates that many brain characteristics can be better explained in terms of features of the social environment (e.g., Dunbar, 1992). This should be expected given the potential for benefits but also costs associated with group living (Humphrey, 1976). Consistent with this perspective, studies have shown that across various primate species the typical group size for a species correlates with neocortex size, such that larger brains are associated with living in larger groups (Barton & Dunbar, 1997; Dunbar, 1992; Sawaguchi & Kudo, 1990). This suggests that social complexity (e.g., tracking others, triadic awareness, etc.) was an important force in brain evolution (Barton & Dunbar, 1997; de Waal, 1998). Moreover, recent research has shown that the degree of deception displayed by various primate species is highly related to neocortex size (Byrne & Corp, 2004). The above findings suggest that although theory of mind and our social perception apparatus allows for some ability to predict others, which should prove advantageous in social domains, the findings on deception in primates suggest that with Predicting Unpredictability in People 5 social prediction also comes the ability to manipulate and to keep from being predicted (cf. Humphrey, 1976), which in itself should be advantageous under specific circumstances. It does not make sense that everyone under all circumstances would have the ability to predict and thus manipulate everyone else’s behaviors. Under some circumstances, individual advantage would accrue not only to those good at social prediction (e.g., able to read minds), but also those better able to keep their own minds from being known and their behavior from being predicted (Miller, 1997; also see Krebs & Dawkins, 1984). We propose that such easily activated reactions in people, especially when confronted with unfamiliar, uncertain, or threatening circumstances, contribute to the difficulty social psychologists and social scientists more generally have in predicting and chasing this social animal. Before delineating our theoretical framework further and describing some initial studies from our lab, we will review approaches taken by social scientists over the last few decades to predict their reticent and less than cooperative human participants. In addition, we will review various findings in a subsequent section that detail some reactions people experience at the prospect of being predicted and figured out. On Social Scientists trying to Predict People What People Say and Do Social psychologists have long regarded people’s attitudes and beliefs and their reports on them as central to predicting social behavior. However, it was not long before they discovered that the road from such reports to corresponding behavior was not straightforward. The extent to which attitudes predict behavior is regarded as one of the Predicting Unpredictability in People 6 most important controversies in attitude research (c.f., Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; Kraus, 1995; Wicker, 1969). Early findings by LaPiere (1934) showing a lack of correspondence between prejudiced attitudes and prejudiced behavior served as the impetus for much research aimed at determining the conditions that augment the attitude/behavior correlation. For example, defining the attitude and behavior at a similar level of abstraction tends to improve prediction, as does having multiple measures of the attitude and behavior (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977). Other factors have been shown to impact the ability to use people’s reported attitudes to predict behavior. These include the stability of the attitude over time (Kraus, 1995), the strength and importance of the attitude (e.g., Krosnick, Boninger, Chuang, Berent, & Carnot, 1993), attitude accessibility in memory (e.g., Fazio, Chen, McDonel, & Sherman, 1982), whether or not the attitude is formed through direct experience (e.g., Regan & Fazio, 1977), and the consonance of the attitudinal components (e.g., affect & cognition) (Millar & Tesser, 1986; Posavac, Sanbonmatsu, & Fazio, 1997) (for a meta analysis see Kraus, 1995). In addition, factors other than the attitude itself, such as the norms surrounding the performance of certain behaviors, also impact the relationship (Ajzen, 1991). As the catalog of factors above suggests, researchers have made great strides in uncovering the many conditions that affect an attitude’s influence on behavior. However, given the diversity of approaches to this issue, with no one approach applying broadly and robustly, we are left with the feeling that predicting people’s behavior from their attitudes requires considerable knowledge of the nature of people’s attitudes as well as considerable knowledge of various situational factors, the person’s state of mind, and so Predicting Unpredictability in People on. To be cognizant of all these factors should amount to an overwhelming task for the most expert researchers, let alone the lay person. Predicting people’s behavior is difficult not only because behavior is determined by many factors and situational cues, but also because, as we argue, at a fundamental level people do not want to be sized up and do not want their behavior predicted. Thus, people either do not provide accurate information on their attitudes and intentions or they intentionally behave in ways that are inconsistent with their attitudes. Given the trouble with predicting people’s behavior from their expressed beliefs and attitudes, it makes much sense that researchers have attempted to assess the content of people’s minds in ways that preclude people’s tendency not to be predicted. The Bogus Pipeline This was the motivation behind a study conducted by Jones and Sigall (1971). These researchers created the bogus pipeline, an impressive contraption made up of a pile of electronic hardware with dials the experimenter could secretly manipulate. The machine was presented to participants as a type of lie detector, whereas participants in the control condition were simply asked to indicate their attitudes on a paper and pencil measure. In one study, for example, Sigall and Page (1971) found that students readily expressed more racial prejudice in the presence of the bogus pipeline. Other studies have shown that people who were illegitimately given information were more likely to confess having that information under bogus pipeline conditions than a control condition (Quigley-Fernandez & Tedeschi, 1978), and women tended to report higher levels of sexual activity under bogus pipeline than a control condition (Alexander & Fisher, 2003; for a review see Roese and Jamieson, 1993). 7 Predicting Unpredictability in People 8 In terms of the present analysis, what is important to note is that in the control conditions people frequently mislead, which is consistent with research indicating that people have a proclivity to lie in day to day life (Kashy and DePaulo, 1996; DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer, & Epstein, 1996) and actually expect others to lie to them on a regular basis (Schul, Burnstein, & Bardi, 1996). The study by Alexander and Fisher (2003) is especially informative. This study, in addition to the bogus pipeline condition, included two comparison conditions, one public (research assistant had access to participants’ responses) and one anonymous. The bogus pipeline condition produced negligible gender differences, so it increased the veracity of the reports (i.e., women reported more sexual activity). The public condition produced the biggest sex difference in reports of sexual activity, but the anonymous condition, in which participants were guaranteed their responses could not be linked to them, also produced a sex difference. This last result suggests that people lied even when they would not be found out. Research efforts have moved beyond the bogus pipeline to trying to assess people’s mental contents in a manner that minimizes participant control, such as using measures of implicit cognition and techniques that allow researchers to assess brain activity. We review these trends next. Implicit Measures of Cognition and Brain Activity There has been an explosion of research on implicit attitudes and cognition and their measurement (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997; Fazio & Olson, 2003; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Implicit attitude assessment usually rests on people’s response latencies to a stimulus of interest. For example, after activating a stereotype of a social group in memory Predicting Unpredictability in People 9 outside conscious awareness (e.g., by subliminally presenting race-relevant words such as white or black), a question of interest might be whether people are subsequently faster at identifying words that are positive or negative in valence, the assumption being that faster recognition for the former represents an implicit positive White bias (e.g., Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997). According to research on implicit attitudes, attitudes may be implicit for various reasons (Brauer, Wasel, & Niedenthal, 2000; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; for a review see Wilson & Dunn, 2004), and there are important theoretical reasons for undertaking such approaches to their measurement. For example, as both philosophers and psychologists have mused, human behavior is many times prompted and directed by cues in the environment of which the person has little knowledge or awareness (Bargh, 1996; Dennett, 1991). But, regardless of the assessment technique used or the theoretical approach taken, we believe there are potentially other reasons for these research efforts: researchers may believe that by doing so they are better able to excavate and make their way to the true nature of people’s minds. An interest in implicit cognition may be deemed necessary because the people being studied many times do not want to be known and predicted. Research in social neuroscience and neuroscience more generally, which many times relies on brain imaging techniques (e.g., PET, fMRI), may similarly serve the unacknowledged purpose of measuring people’s minds more directly by bypassing people’s social and communicative processes. These different techniques have become of great interest to psychologists because they provide a sense that it is possible to assess participants’ responses in a manner that precludes the various problems Predicting Unpredictability in People 10 associated with gaining valid information from people. By examining people’s implicit responses or peering straight into the brain structures themselves (assuming there is good consensus as to what those structures do), researchers may gain confidence that they are assessing “true” responses. We offer our proposals as informed speculation. Researchers may go to great lengths to study cognition in the ways described above because it cannot be studied by asking the participants themselves. And one reason they cannot rely on participants’ responses is that people many times do not want to be known and predicted (whether consciously or not). The Averseness of Being the Target of Prediction In general, people should find the prospect of being the object of prediction aversive. Thus, at times, they may want to avoid these unpleasant states or circumstances by being unpredictable, a hypothesis we test in studies to be reviewed subsequently. At this point, our aim is to review several findings from the literature to show across various paradigms that people are prone to feel scrutinized and that they are being watched by others. These various reactions make sense in the context of our framework, in that such aversive responses may signal to people that they should exit such situations or enact responses that will foil others’ social prediction attempts. Day-to-Day Paranoia One such phenomenon is referred to as paranoid cognition (e.g., Kramer, 1994), which relates to a person’s beliefs, for example, that they are being persecuted (cf. Colby, 1981). More recently researchers have explored the social and situational Predicting Unpredictability in People 11 aspects of paranoid cognition instead of focusing on individual pathology (e.g., Fenigstein & Vanable, 1992; Zimbardo, Andersen, & Kabat, 1981). Such research suggests that people in many social situations, especially novel ones, may be prone to feelings of uncertainty about what others think of them (cf. Festinger, 1954). Hence, people are apt to be sensitive to various social cues and to ruminate about them (Colby, 1981). Although this can be regarded as a normal process, certain situational factors and reactions can transform these cognitions into more dysfunctional forms, such as greater self-consciousness and the feeling that one is being scrutinized (Lord & Saenz, 1985). Social uncertainly can also increase people’s misinterpretation of events (and elaboration of such misinterpretations), which can result in feelings of discomfort in the presence of others. Social uncertainty can also lead to judgments that others are not open to them and can give rise to distrust (as reported in Kramer & Wei, 1999). Uncertain social situations can prompt people to feel as if they are being scrutinized. But it is also interesting to consider the idea that people, regardless of the circumstances, are generally inclined to such thinking. For example, in one sample of 324 college students, researchers found that 47% of those participants had had some experience of paranoia (Ellet, Lopes & Chadwick, 2003). In a different study, Fenigstein and Vanable (1992, Study 1) constructed and validated a measure of paranoia that consisted of 32 items. The investigators found that out of a range of 20-100 for the total score on the paranoia scale (the higher the score, the higher the paranoia), the mean was 42.7. Given that paranoid responses were highly and negatively correlated with social desirability (Fenigstein & Vanable, 1992), meaning people seemed aware of the Predicting Unpredictability in People 12 potential for social disapproval from endorsing such items, many respondents nevertheless felt that some of the paranoid experiences described in the items applied to them. The above findings suggest that even people from non-clinical samples may be apt to feel on occasion that they are being watched, that there is a need to be suspicious, and to potentially assume ill will on the part of others. Other phenomena to be reviewed presently further corroborate the idea that people often do feel scrutinized, and as we suggest, feel that they are being subjected to other's prediction efforts. Below we discuss these reactions, namely the "spotlight" effect and the “illusion of transparency." Spotlight Effect The “spotlight” refers to an effect in which people overestimate the degree to which their actions and appearance are noticed and evaluated by others (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999; Gilovich, Kruger, & Medvec, 2002; Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000). Interestingly, the feelings that others are taking special notice and that one is being watched are thought of as classical indicators of paranoid ideology (e.g., Magaro, 1980; Millon, 1981). Fenigstein and Vanable (1992, Study 2) showed, for example, that the more people were predisposed toward having paranoid thoughts, the more they felt they were being observed. In two studies on the “spotlight” effect, participants were asked to wear a t-shirt with a potentially embarrassing or flattering image (Gilovich et al., 2000, Studies 1 & 2). In these studies participants overestimated the number of people who would be able to remember the images on the shirts. Thus, participants felt that they stood out and that Predicting Unpredictability in People 13 others were scrutinizing them much more so than was actually the case. Feeling as if one is in the spotlight thus represents one way in which most people can feel as if others are taking notice and scrutinizing the self. Feeling Transparent The feelings of transparency studied by Gilovich and colleagues (e.g., Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999; Vorauer, & Cameron, 2002; Vorauer & Ross, 1999) may be slightly different manifestations of the same reactions underlying the spotlight effect and paranoid cognition more generally. As described by Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec (1998), feelings of transparency are nicely illustrated by the responses of the protagonist in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, in which he is trying to suppress his reaction to the crime he has committed while conversing with three police officers. The protagonist is so taken by his anxiety that he actually feels he can hear, as can the police, the beating heart of his victim buried underneath the floorboards. To feel transparent is for a person to feel as if one’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are leaking out for all to see (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999). Evidence for the transparency effect comes from various sources. For example, Barr and Kleck (1995) had participants watch a video and then judge how expressive they had been during the viewing. The results showed that the participants rated themselves as more expressive than a group of observers judged them to be. The researchers then had the participants watch the covertly recorded videos. The participants actually expressed surprise as to how inexpressive they seemed in the video recordings. This study nicely illustrates that people are prone to think that they are being explicitly analyzed, and that their internal states are readily available to others. Predicting Unpredictability in People 14 Due to different factors, the above review suggests that people are predisposed to assume some form of paranoid thinking, which usually coincides with overgeneralization of scrutiny and the unpleasant feelings of self-consciousness (Fenigstein & Vanable, 1992). We suggest that such states should be unpleasant to people because they serve as a signal that the situation they are in is one in which others are potentially keen on figuring them out and predicting their behavior. The Social Prediction Dynamic: Delineating the Theoretical Framework In describing the efforts of social scientists to find better ways to ascertain valid information from their participants we have aimed to highlight the person perception or prediction side of the social prediction dynamic. Our discussion on people’s readiness to feel scrutinized speaks to the responses of the person as the object of prediction. Up to this point, we have thus focused on the form the social prediction dynamic takes when people find themselves in uncertain, contentious, or unfamiliar social circumstances. But social prediction and people’s responses to prediction are dynamic in that people should be sensitive not only to the negative and threatening aspects of social situations but also their positive and propitious characteristics as well. Thus, it is important to consider the social interaction factors that may highlight people’s need to be predicted in some situations but not others. Cooperation, Competition and the Benefits and Costs of Group Living Group living creates benefits but also potential costs for individuals (Barash, 1977; Humphrey, 1976). For example, group living brings together potential mates but also increases competition for them. Social living is beneficial in the acquisition of food, but competition surfaces when resources are scarce. Living with others aids in the Predicting Unpredictability in People 15 defense against predators or other groups, but costs include the problem of free-riders. Thus, group living is and was likely to be a complex and ever shifting mix of both competitive and cooperative scenarios. At the same time, while being able to predict another’s behavior was probably adaptive regardless of the situation, the adaptive benefit of being predicted was probably contextual, depending on whether the situation was cooperative or competitive. We propose that reactions to others’ attempts to predict the self have been shaped by natural selection to be sensitive to the cooperative (safe, favorable) or competitive (threatening, unfavorable) nature of the immediate situation. Cooperative and safe contexts should shift one towards lessened discomfort at the prospect of being known and predicted. In such situations, benefits should result from mutual prediction by known and trusted others. Many activities throughout human and primate evolution have required coordinated responses and rest on the individual’s ability to build and maintain coalitions for mutual protection against enemies or individuals who abuse power within the group (Boehm, 1997; de Waal, 1998). Hunting and food-gathering activities can also require high levels of coordination. The benefits of mutual ‘mind reading’ between members of such cooperative groups should not require elaboration. In addition, members of a group must be transparent enough to members of the opposite sex for courting and reproduction to take place. Although there is much uncertainty in the courting of a mate, there will be no offspring and protection of those offspring if some transparency of intentions, desires, and needs fails to be established between the courting parties and, eventually, their offspring. In essence, we predict transparency and predictability to increase to the degree that fates are shared between Predicting Unpredictability in People 16 predictors and the targets of prediction. Importantly, such a shift should have at least as much to do with the situation as it does the people involved; a desire to be transparent to someone in one context (e.g., hunting) does not necessarily transfer to a desire to be transparent to the same person in a different context (e.g., coalition building). Competitive contexts should do the opposite: people should strive to be opaque and unpredictable to unfamiliar or potentially contentious parties (cf. Miller, 1997). The adaptive response to many situations throughout human and primate evolution, involving both ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ members, should have depended on the individual’s ability to keep oneself from being known, sized-up, and predicted by others when this information could be used to one’s detriment. Considerations of signal detection theory as applied to human cognitive evolution (Nesse, 2001; Haselton & Buss, 2003) would predict a cognitive system that commits fewer of the costliest errors at the expense of committing more of the less costly errors. Thus, we might expect that the occasional event of being predicted by a competitor would be more costly than the occasional event of being unpredictable to a friend, which should incline humans, as a default, to be unpredictable, opaque, and difficult to ‘figure out’. Some of the benefits (or reduction in costs) of being unknown and unpredictable in competitive situations would include not being harmed, betrayed, or taken advantage of. Avoiding such negative outcomes should have proven useful in winning competitions, conflict resolution, securing resources and perhaps mates, and maintaining a given role or rank within a group. Some of the costs of being unknown and unpredictable when the situation was truly cooperative might be that one would be distrusted, disliked, or ostracized by potential cooperative partners. Thus, for uncertain Predicting Unpredictability in People 17 or contentious social circumstances, we predict that people should want to be opaque and unpredictable. In the next section we test some implications of our model, which suggest that people’s reactions to being sized up and predicted should be responsive to the contentious or cooperative (threatening or safe) nature of the social interaction. Although people may generally be biased toward being unpredictable, our perspective holds that people should relax these tendencies when circumstances prove to be cooperative or more generally safe and favorable. Situational Factors Moderate the Need to be Unpredictable Evidence for Changes in Behavioral Tendencies In two preliminary survey studies (n=366) (Ybarra, Keller, Baron, Chan, Garcia, & Sanchez-Burks, 2005), we conceptualized and created measures of three behavioral tendencies that should be sensitive to people’s positive or negative interpersonal expectations. For these studies participants’ ratings of the world as exploitative and competitive (as assessed by a measure of social distrust) were correlated with these three self-reported tendencies of not wanting to be known and predicted. These social interaction tendencies (SIT) included: Unwillingness to self-disclose, which measured reticence and an unwillingness to open up to others; Deceptiveness, which reflected a willingness to use deception in dealing with people; and Unpredictability, which assessed the degree to which participants felt they were complex, difficult to understand, and inconsistent from situation to situation. We predicted that people who view their social world as more competitive would report a greater frequency of these behavioral tendencies. Predicting Unpredictability in People 18 We treated social distrust as the predictor variable and ran multivariate regressions on the three subscales above. Consistent with expectations, in both studies people who tended to be distrustful of others’ intentions also conceived of themselves as less willing to self-disclose, more deceptive, and less predictable. Thus, by holding a view of the world as competitive, people appear more likely to display behavioral tendencies that would be counter-measures to being exploited and predicted. We conducted a follow-up experiment (Ybarra et al., 2005, Study 3, n=202) to eliminate counter explanations associated with correlational findings and also to show that people when placed in competitive and cooperative situations adopt a greater or lesser need not to be known and to be predictable. In this experiment we led participants to believe they would interact with another participant in a competitive or cooperative situation. We also included a control group of participants who did not expect to be involved in any interaction. In the competition and cooperation conditions participants blindly selected a colored badge from a bag at the beginning of the session and pinned the badge to their shirts. Participants were then asked to find their “opponent” (competition condition) or “partner” (cooperation condition) with the same badge color and sit across from them. In the competition and cooperation conditions, the participants were told they and the person sitting across from them would go to another room to play a game called “Matching Wits.” We manipulated the participants’ expectations of competition or cooperation by describing this game differently depending on condition. Prior to going forward with the game, we asked participants to fill out some personality questionnaires for a second, unrelated study. Embedded in the battery were our assessments of the Predicting Unpredictability in People 19 three subscales used to operationalize people’s tendency not to be known and predictable. We expected that compared to the control condition, participants expecting to compete in the upcoming game would feel less willing to disclose information about themselves, would be more inclined to be deceptive, and would be more inclined to be unpredictable. In contrast, we expected participants in the cooperative situation to show a reduction relative to the control condition in these behavioral tendencies (SIT). More importantly, we expected the two experimental conditions to differ significantly from each other. Figure 1: The three measures of SIT (+/- 1 standard error) as a function of experimental condition Competition 0.40 z-score 0.20 Control 0.00 Cooperation -0.20 -0.40 Deceptiveness Unwillingness to self-disclose Unpredictability The overall analysis indicated there were differences among the conditions, (MANOVA omnibus Wilk’s F, p < .05). As can be seen in Figure 1, for each subscale, the responses of the control group were midway between the means of the two experimental conditions. In testing our specific prediction, the contrast comparing the Predicting Unpredictability in People 20 competition vs. cooperation condition was significant (p < .01). The univariate contrasts conducted on each dependent measure separately were significant for Unwillingness to self-disclose (p < .01) and Unpredictability (p < .01), and marginally so for Deceptiveness (p = .06). In subsequent analyses we controlled for mood valence and arousal, which did not alter the significance levels of the contrasts. Thus, participants’ behavioral tendencies were modified depending upon whether they thought they were going to compete or cooperate in a manner consistent with our model’s predictions. Interestingly, in this experiment participants indicated how they felt that they typically behave, so their reporting on the social interaction tendencies does not seem to have been consciously mediated in response to the upcoming game. Evidence for Changes in Self-Definitions and the use of Survey Responses In the above studies participants reported on specific behavioral tendencies that had to do with being unpredictable, not wanting to be known, and being deceptive. In the next study, we wanted to examine whether people’s self definitions, in terms of the trait dispositions they endorse, would shift toward not wanting to be known and toward being unpredictable as a function of the anticipated interpersonal context. How can we infer such a shift in self-definitions? Well, surveys can be created to allow for this. On a standard semantic differential scale, participants choose between two bipolar or opposing trait adjectives, such as “interesting” on one end and “boring” at the other end, and the intervening intervals are delineated so that the mid-point represents no endorsement of “interesting” or “boring.” However, we could give participants a modified semantic differential scale in which a) they have to choose one of the trait labels at either pole of the scale or b) they Predicting Unpredictability in People 21 have the option of choosing “both” or “neither” if they feel both traits capture what they are like or if they do not feel either of the traits is self-descriptive, respectively. In particular, a “both” response may serve to instill the expectation of unpredictability in behavior, as the person is basically saying I can assume either of these opposing dispositional qualities. The critical question we examined in this last study was whether a subtle experimental intervention aimed at shifting people’s interpersonal expectations could create changes in self-definitions. We expected that people with negative interpersonal expectations would choose “both” when endorsing traits about the self to a greater extent than people with positive interpersonal expectations, who in turn would choose to a greater extent one of the two listed traits. In this study (Ybarra & Chan, 2005) we induced interpersonal expectations by having people in the first part of two, ostensibly unrelated studies bring to mind and write about a person they knew. In the negative interpersonal expectancies condition the participants were asked to bring to mind the image of a person they disliked. In the positive interpersonal expectations condition participants were asked to bring to mind the image of a person they liked. After completing this part of the experiment, the participants were presented with the second, unrelated study in which they were asked to endorse from a list those traits that described them. The traits were presented as pairs (n pairs = 21) on a horizontal line. Participants had to choose one of the traits or if they wanted they could choose “both” or neither.” Predicting Unpredictability in People 22 Table 1: The mean number of times specific traits and the “both” option were selected as a function of experimental condition. Condition # of Traits Recall Liked Other (n=18) 11.28 (3.49) # of “Both” 9.28 (3.61) Recall Disliked Other (n=17) 8.47 (4.23) 11.65 (3.99) The main results for the study are presented in Table 1. “Neither” responses were infrequent and thus were not analyzed. A mixed design analysis produced an interaction of the two factors (p < .05). As suggested by the means in Table 1, participants who brought to mind an image of a person who they did not like chose fewer, specific traits to describe the self than participants who recalled a liked other (p < .04). In terms of choosing the “both” option, the participants who recalled the disliked other chose “both” more frequently than participants who recalled the liked other in a marginally significant contrast (p < .07). It is important to keep in mind that participants could have chosen “neither” as well, but they hardly did this (M’s less than 1 in both conditions). The findings from this study showed that by simply having participants bring to mind the image of a liked or disliked other who they knew, we impacted participants’ self-definitions and their use of survey responses. We propose that the use of the “both” option in the survey provides people with the ability to hide the self and to express that they are unpredictable. As predicted by our model and consistent with the results from the previous experiment, this tendency toward not wanting to be known and to be unpredictable was more likely when the interpersonal context was negative or threatening than positive or safe. Predicting Unpredictability in People 23 Conclusion Our general purpose in this chapter has been to put forth a theoretical framework that emphasizes not only the prediction side of social perception but also how the object of prediction, many times a moving target, responds to the prospect of being predicted. We argue that our behavioral tendencies carry the imprint of our ancestral social past, with a sensitivity to the threatening or safe nature of interpersonal situations. We believe the analysis has broad implications for other variables that affect the tenor of social interactions or relationships, for example, the relative power between parties, whether the interaction is one-shot or long term, or other factors that influence trust or approachability more generally. But, given the frequency with which people are likely to find themselves in uncertain social situations in modern times, it may be that we have inherited mechanisms that predispose us too easily and too often toward not wanting to be known and to be predictable. It is such reactions that may many times lay the foundation for the trouble with predicting human behavior and the lament of the social scientist. Hence, the present analysis reveals the value in predicting human behavior in unpredictable ways. Predicting Unpredictability in People 24 References Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1977). Attitude-behaviour relations: A theoretical analysis and review of empirical research. 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(email: [email protected]; phone: 734-763-3156) 32 Predicting Unpredictability in People Footnote 1 This assertion in some circles might raise some hackles given the “Other Minds” problem. As the Solipsism doctrine holds, and as famous philosophers such as Descartes have argued, it may be that people only really know their own minds, and from their mental states infer what another might think and feel. This is what we mean by good enough guesses. 33