What do we want to know about others?
There's talk at the office about the new colleague. You overhear either that:
[1] they are a bad parent, or
[2] that they are a poor tennis player
Which piece of information would pique your interest more? Why is it [1]?
One answer—from a functionalist perspective on social cognition—is that knowing whether or not they are a bad parent is more relevant for your workplace relationship with this person.
Goals guide perception, and context guides goals.
My work in social cognition explores this idea.
By experimentally manipulating aspects of targets (the people you are perceiving) and the social context, we gain insights into basic questions of social cognition and interpersonal relationships more broadly.
Here are some examples:
What we want to know about other people depends on the other person's age.
Billet, M. I., Hohm, I., Dunn, R. M.*, Hofer, M. K., Sidloski, B., & Schaller, M. (in press). What Do people want to know about another person? The answer differs depending on whether that person is an adult or a child. PLOS one. Preprint available: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p3xf6
What we want to know about other people depends on the situation.
Billet, M. I., McCall, H. C., & Schaller, M. (2022). What motives do people most want to know about when meeting another person? An investigation into prioritization of information about seven fundamental motives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(4), 495–509. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211069468 [pdf]
Trusting Bad People
Relatedly, I conducted a study with Cynthia Fekken during my undergraduate training at Queen's University, Canada. We wanted to know why people still trust bad people with bad reputations. After all, people get hurt all the time by trusting the wrong person.
One idea is that we judge bad people to be proficient at doing bad things, and when you want a bad thing done right, you will be motivated to trust a bad person. We didn't find any evidence for that idea.
We did find that bad people who propose to do good things are judged to be more trustworthy than good people who propose to do bad things. Bad people might take advantage of this tendency.
We trust bad people when they say they are going to do good things.
Billet, M. I., & Fekken, G. C. (2020). The influence of instrumentality in trusting Dark Triad members. Personality and Individual Differences, 154, 109690. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109690 [pdf]