The sounds of social life: exploring students' daily social environments and natural conversations
Year: 2004
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Recently, concerns have been raised that psychology has lost contact with \nnaturally-occurring social life and that the discipline would benefit from a course \ncorrection towards more context- and culture-sensitive research. What do people do over \nthe course of a day? What psychological factors account for the different lives they live? \nThese questions aim at rather basic issues in psychology. Yet surprisingly little is known \nabout how individuals behave, select situations, and interact with their environments in \nthe real world. We have recently introduced the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) \nas a research tool for sampling behavioral data in naturalistic settings. The EAR records \n30-second snippets of ambient sounds in participants’ immediate environments \napproximately every 12 minutes. This dissertation used three major EAR data sets to \nreveal how students’ social lives are related to basic psychological processes that \ntraditionally have been at the heart of the discipline. Study 1 laid the methodological \nfoundations by showing that the EAR is generally tolerated well by students, perceived as \nfairly unobtrusive, and worn with high levels of compliance. Study 2 provided a \nquantitative ethnography of students’ daily lives. It established the base rates and the \ndegree of interindividual variability in their social environments and natural \nconversations. It further tested for gender and ethnic differences in social life. Finally, it \nidentified systematic circadian fluctuations in students’ daily lives. Study 3 investigated \nthe role that everyday social life plays in interpersonal perception. Following Brunswik’s \nlens-model paradigm, the analyses showed that unacquainted observers formed fairly \naccurate personality impressions about a target person on the basis of the person’s EARrecorded \nsocial life. With regard to the underlying perceptual paths, the analyses revealed \nthat observers’ impressions were shaped by various cues derived from the targets’ daily \ninteractions, locations, activities, moods and language use. Taken together, the three \nstudies identified the ways people select and interact with their everyday environments as \npowerful behavioral markers of individual differences. On a broader level they laid the \nfoundation for a psychological study of naturalistic person-situation interactions that \noffers a new look at basic conceptual questions in personality psychology.
Author: Matthias R. Mehl
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1730922141