Gender Differences in Impression Formation

This paper aims to highlight the differences between men and women regarding impressionformation. It is based on secondary analysis of the data gathered in two previous experiments withsimilar conditions. However, the hypotheses formulated within this study have not been testedbefore. The current analysis was conducted on 86 participants, 47 males and 39 females. Their agesranged between 15 and 32, as they were either high school or university students engaged in amaster’s program. Their task consisted of watching a 14 seconds long video of a female confederatereading a neutral text and then evaluating her using a semantic differential with four dimensions:sociability, ethics, power and activity. Based on previous studies, it was hypothesized that men andwomen will form different first impressions of the actor employed in the movie. More precisely, themajority of the studies undertaken in this area compare men and women’s accuracy scores of facialexpressions decoding, yielding mostly significant differences, with women achieving higheraccuracy. A small percentage has addressed other aspects of social perception like: personality traitsor socio-demographic characteristics, yielding similar results. However, the current experimentfailed to reveal any differences between men’s and women’s evaluations. Accuracy assessmentswere disregarded in this study, since establishing unequivocal criteria for personality traitsevaluation is yet to be achieved. The results are consistent with a small percentage of the studiesconducted on gender differences in social perception and allow multiple interpretations

Resistance in business-to-business “cold” sales calls

In “cold” sales calls, the salesperson’s job is to turn call-takers, or “prospects”, into clients while, very often, the latter resist them. In contrast to laboratory-based research, “cold” calls provide a natural environment where the stakes are real and resistance is manifest. We collected and transcribed 159 “cold” calls the goal of which was for salespeople to secure an appointment to meet prospects. Using discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we identified two practices – “blocks” and “stalls” – through which prospects resisted salespeople’s attempts to schedule a sales appointment while also moving to terminate the interaction or delay the scheduling of an eventual appointment. Our findings show that, when approached as an interactive and situated discursive accomplishment, rather than a cognitive process, the practices involved in resisting can be better identified, described, and shared in ways that transform our understanding of resistance as a social psychological phenomenon

What Does “Resistance” Actually Look Like? The Respecification of Resistance as an Interactional Accomplishment

In this introductory article to the special issue on Resistance in Talk-in-Interaction, we review the vast body of research that has respecified resistance by investigating it as and when it occurs in real-life encounters. Using methodological approaches such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, studies of resistance “in the wild” treat social interaction as a sequentially organized, joint enterprise. As a result, resistance emerges as the alternative to cooperation and therefore, on each occasion, resistant actions are designed to deal with the sequential and moral accountabilities that arise from the specifics of the situation. By documenting the wide array of linguistic, prosodic, sequential, and embodied resources that individuals use to resist the requirements set by interlocutors’ prior turns, this article provides the first comprehensive overview of existing research on resistance as an interactional accomplishment.</p

Speaking out against everyday sexism: Gender and epistemics in accusations of “mansplaining”

In everyday interaction, subtle manifestations of sexism often pass unacknowledged and become internalised and thus perceived as "natural" conduct. The introduction of new vocabularies for referring to previously unnamed sexist conduct would presumably enable individuals to start problematising hitherto unchallengeable sexism (Calder-Dawe, 2015). In this paper, we investigate whether and how these vocabularies empower people to speak out against sexism. We focus on the use of the term “mansplaining” which, although coined over 10 years ago, remains controversial and contested. Using Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, this paper excavates the interactional methods individuals use to formulate, in vivo, some prior spate of talk as mansplaining. In doing so, speakers necessarily reformulate a co-participant’s social action to highlight its sexist nature. Accusations of mansplaining are accomplished by invoking gender (and other) categories and their associated rights to knowledge. In reconstructing another’s conduct as mansplaining, speakers display their understanding of what mansplaining is (and could be) for the purpose at hand. Thus, the paper contributes to the well-established body of interactional research on manifestations of sexism by documenting how the normativity of epistemic rights is mobilised as a resource for bringing off accusations of mansplaining

Persuasive Conduct: Alignment and Resistance in Prospecting “Cold” Calls

Social psychology has theorized the cognitive processes underlying persuasion, without considering its interactional infrastructure – the discursive actions through which persuasion is accomplished interactionally. Our paper aims to fill this gap, by using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis to examine 153 ‘cold’ calls, in which salespeople seek to secure meetings with prospective clients. We identify two sets of communicative practices that comprise persuasive conduct: (1) pre-expanding the meeting request with accounts that secure prospects’ alignment to this course of action without disclosing its end-result and (2) minimizing the imposition of the meeting to reduce the prospect’s opportunities for refusal. We conclude that persuasive conduct consists in managing the recipiency of the meeting requests by promoting alignment and hampering resistance. Overall, this paper contributes to the wider discursive psychological project of ‘respecifying’ psychological phenomena like attitudes, memory, and emotion from the realm of social cognition to the realm of social interaction

sj-docx-1-fap-10.1177_09593535231197526 - Supplemental material for Porridge and misogyny: Rationalising inconspicuous misogyny in morning television shows

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-fap-10.1177_09593535231197526 for Porridge and misogyny: Rationalising inconspicuous misogyny in morning television shows by Anna Ridley, Bogdana Humă and Linda Walz in Feminism & Psychology</p

‘Looking after the least fortunate in our society’; Shared membership, commonsense, and morality as resources for identification between politicians and voters

This article draws on research conducted within the project “Persuasion through identification in political discourse” funded by the Social Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. We would like to thank Amy Marsh for kindly sharing data from her thesis for our project.</p

Vocabularies of social influence: Managing the moral accountability of influencing another

While there are many definitions and conceptual accounts of ‘persuasion’ and other forms of social influence, social scientists lack empirical insight into how and when people actually use terms like ‘persuade’, ‘convince’, ‘change somebody's mind’ – what we call the vocabularies of social influence – in actual social interaction. We collected instances of the spontaneous use of these and other social influence terms (such as ‘schmoozing’ and ‘hoodwinking’) in face‐to‐face and telephone conversations across multiple domestic and institutional settings. The recorded data were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology and conversation analysis with a focus on the actions accomplished in and through the use of social influence terms. We found that when speakers use 'persuading' – but not 'convincing' or 'changing somebody’s mind' – it is in the service of orienting to the moral accountability of influencing others. The specificity with which social actors deploy these terms demonstrates the continued importance of developing our understandings of the meaning of words – especially psychological ones – via their vernacular use by ordinary people in the first instance, rather than have psychologists reify, operationalize, and build an architecture for social psychology without paying attention to what people actually do with the ‘psychological thesaurus’