Seeing the world through others' minds: Inferring social context from behaviour

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Neuroscience
• Nonverbal Communication

Background:

• Facial expressions convey emotions and intentions (mentalising).
• Previous research shows inference of past events from facial reactions (retrodictive mindreading).
• The current study explores inferring social context from observed responses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if observers can determine a target's social context (alone vs. observed) from their facial responses to stimuli.
• To examine if judgments of target expressivity correlate with social context inference.
• To analyze perceiver eye movements during social context judgments.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Perceivers judged if targets were alone or observed based on facial responses.
• Experiment 2: Perceivers judged if targets were hiding or exaggerating expressions, discriminating between observed and alone conditions.
• Experiment 3: Assessed the correlation between social context judgments and target expressivity estimations. Eye-tracking was used in Experiments 1 and 2.

Main Results:

• Perceivers accurately inferred whether targets were alone or observed by others.
• Judgments of expression management (hiding/exaggerating) differentiated between observed and alone contexts.
• Perceiver eye movements differed based on the target's social context.
• Social context judgments showed some association with target expressivity estimations.

Conclusions:

• Visible responses to stimuli allow observers to infer unseen social contexts.
• This demonstrates an ability to use others' mental states as a window into their social environment.
• Findings extend the understanding of social perception beyond emotion and intention.