Tag: Sanjay Srivastava

Perceptions of Risky Sexual Behavior

Presenter: Serena Agterberg − Psychology, Sociology  

Faculty Mentor(s): Sanjay Srivastava, Bradley Hughes

(In-Person) Poster Presentation 

College is a time when many young adults engage in sexual behavior that may involve physical, psychological, and/or emotional risk. Accurately assessing the ways in which college students are perceiving and engaging in sexual risk taking is an important step in understanding what information needs to be distributed on campuses to eliminate consequences of risk taking. The purpose of this study is to examine college students’ perception of sexual risk taking in their own and others’ behavior. This study will seek to answer the following research questions:

1. What sexual behaviors do college students consider to be “risky”?

2. How do individual differences affect views of and participation in sexual risk taking?

300 participants from the University of Oregon human subjects pool were recruited for this study. Participants were asked to write two narratives describing times in which they, someone close to them, or someone they know participated in sexual behavior that they would consider to be “risky.” Participants then answered questions about personality and were asked for demographic information. The narratives were analyzed using an inductive thematic analysis to identify patterns in the responses. Identifying which behaviors are of concern to college students as well as examining which individual differences relate to attitudes about sexual risk taking will help in the creation and execution of sexual risk reduction strategies.

Using Personality to Predict Risky Sexual Behavior

Presenter: Serena Agterberg − Psychology, Sociology

Faculty Mentor(s): Sanjay Srivastava, Bradley Hughes

(In-Person) Oral Panel—Healthy Considerations, Poster Presentation 

To investigate the relationship between personality traits and risky sexual behavior (RSB) with the goal of understanding if students with different levels of stable individual differences may be more or less likely to engage in RSB, we collected data from N= 605 college students. Participants completed the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) and the Sexual Risk Survey (SRS). We estimated correlations of each Big Five domain and facet with overall sexual risk, and four subscales of risk: Sexual Risk Taking, Risky Sex Acts, Impulsive Sexual Behavior, and Intent to Engage in Risky Sexual Behaviors. The results suggest that students with high Extraversion, low Conscientiousness, and low Agreeableness are most likely to engage in overall RSB. Low Agreeableness is the strongest indicator of likelihood of participating in overall RSB, as well as all four subscales of risk. Several BFI-2 facets were significantly related to RSB including high sociability, high assertiveness, low respect, and low compassion. These results indicate that personality may be a valuable asset in identifying students who are more or less likely to engage in RSB.

Personality Impressions on Twitter

Presenter: Tad Falk

Mentor: Sanjay Srivastava

Oral Presentation

Major: Psychology 

The creation and increasing popularity of social media websites have changed the way people around the world interact with one another. Having our information available to the world allows others, such as potential employers, business contacts, new friends and even potential romantic partners to get to know us without ever needing to meet in person. Thus, it is important to understand which types of cues people use when forming judgments and whether these judgments are consistent across various observers. This study examined the extent to which participants agreed on their impressions of Twitter users based only on information presented in the users’ Twitter profile. 131 Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers and 89 University of Oregon Human Subject Pool participants evaluated a random selection of Twitter users’ profile pages. Multilevel modeling techniques were used to separate observer and target effects in order to estimate trait level agreement. This multilevel model with random effects for profile and observer allowed us to obtain estimates of variance attributable to profiles and observers. Following Shrout and Fleiss (1979) and Shrout (1993) those variance components were then used to calculate intraclass correlations (ICC), which were used as the measure of consensus. On average, participants agreed most about the degree of users’ thoroughness, intelligence, social economic status, and arrogance. Participants agreed least about the degree of users’ assertiveness, artistic interest, nervousness, and sense of humor. The findings of this study support existing literature regarding the ability of third party observers to make consistent judgments of strangers based on limited amounts of information present on social media websites. This study also extends previous literature to Twitter, a microblogging social media platform and one of the most popular social media websites in the world.

Thin-Slice Socioeconomic Status: Comparing Thin-Slice and Longer Judgments of SES and the Cues That Inform Them

Presenter(s): Arianna Zarosinski − Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Sanjay Srivastava, Bradley Hughes

Poster 104

Research Area: Social Science – Social Psychology

Thin-slice perceptions, or perceptions made of others prior to interaction or after a brief interaction, have been widely studied in personality trait domains. The thin-slice approach has also been used to examine perceptions of social class. Socioeconomic status is an important factor in this discussion, as perceived SES can influence overall perceptions of others. However, few studies on socioeconomic status have been conducted using the thin-slice approach. In this study, we examine whether thin-slice judgements of SES are as accurate as predictions formed from longer observations by comparing thin-slice ratings of 60 second videos with ratings made after a 20-min interaction. We also examine whether observed cues used to express and make judgements of socioeconomic status differ between thin-slice observations (1-minute) and longer (20 minute) observations using a Brunswik lens analysis. This study is preregistered through the Open Science Framework, and a sample of 750 thin-slice ratings of SES and 750 ratings of observed cues are being collected from the University of Oregon Psychology and Linguistics human subject pool. *This is an ongoing study and results will be included in the presentation. It will also be altered to refer to the study in the past tense.

Perceived Power and Affiliation: The Association Between Perceived Power and Liking in Dyadic Interactions

Presenter(s): Joshua Pearman

Faculty Mentor(s): Bradley Hughes & Sanjay Srivastava

Poster 96

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

In interpersonal dynamics, perceptions of power can influence social outcomes, such as liking or respect. Although most studies focus on how power in others influences these outcomes, there is a lack of work on the influence of self-perceived power on one’s behavior and judgments. Therefore, this research examines how one’s self-perception of power predicts social outcomes during dyadic interactions, which involve two people interacting with one other. Specifically, I worked with the Personality and Social Dynamics Lab to examine the relationship between self- perceived power, experienced during the interaction, and how much the perceiver liked the interaction partner, thought the target liked them, and how much they enjoyed the interaction. These relationships were tested with actor-partner interdependence models. We collected data after 20 minute dyadic social interactions, in which participants worked together on an art gallery task to choose the best 3 paintings out of the 20 provided to display in a hypothetical museum (N = 320). Results indicated a strong relationship between perceived power and how much a participant liked their partner, as well as a strong relationship between perceived power and how much a participant thought their interaction partner liked them. There was not a significant relationship between perceived power and enjoyment of the interaction activity. While previous literature focuses on either how assigned power can influence behavior or how perceived power can be influenced by socio-structural and psychological factors, the present work seeks to examine how perceived power can predict feelings of affiliations when two people interact.

Heard it Through the Grapevine: Does Physical Attractiveness Affect Impressions Formed via Gossip?

Presenter(s): Kylie Davis

Faculty Mentor(s): Sanjay Srivastava & Cory Costello

Poster 100

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

People share information about others’ personalities via gossip, but little is known about what affects these impressions formed via gossip (i.e., hearsay reputations). We investigated the effect of targets’ physical attractiveness on hearsay reputations, assessing whether attractiveness’ effects on direct (face-to-face) impressions (e.g., Lorenzo et al., 2010) carry over through gossip. Across 2 studies, 629 undergraduates participated in groups of 3 or 4. Two participants got to know one another (target/P1), each told a new participant (P2) about the person they had just met, and then they rated each other. Physically attractive people were seen as more conscientious, less neurotic, and more extraverted by P1s (|β’s| from .13 to .18; p’s < .01), replicating the link between attractiveness and more positive impressions. This tendency was only partly carried over to P2s, who rated physically attractive targets as only more Extraverted (β = .09, p < .05; other |β’s| ≤ .05). Finally, targets’ attractiveness did not influence consensus between P1 and P2 (|β’s| ≤ .05). Attractiveness thus appears to more greatly impact direct face-to-face impressions than hearsay reputations.

What Parts of Status Matter? Comparing Respect and Admiration to Social Influence

Presenter(s): Joshua Pearman—Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Bradley Hughes, Sanjay Srivastava

Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation

In social hierarchies, people are organized based on their relative status compared to others . A person’s status is determined by the judgments of others and has two components: respect and admiration and social influence The focus of this work was to understand the relationship and effects of these components in interpersonal perceptions . We tested three hypotheses: 1) The components of status, respect/admiration and social influence, will be associated such that individuals who are perceived as having greater respect/admiration will also have higher levels of social influence; 2) Others will agree about who has status in a group (consensus), and will also agree about their own relative status in the group (self-other agreement); 3) Personality traits will predict who attains status . To test these hypotheses, we had groups of n = 4 – 6 (N = 218) complete a leaderless group decision making task and then provide ratings about the status and personality of each of the other members of the group and make decisions about who they would prefer to work with on future tasks . The preregistered analysis will use a Social Relations Model approach to account for dependencies in the data and linear regression models to test the hypotheses . We will present the results from this analysis and discuss implications of a two-component approach to status for future work .