Social vision is a sub-topic of social psychology that investigates the ways from which individuals extract information and perceive others using their vision alone. The field of social vision is highly interdisciplinary and located at the nexus of social psychology, communication studies, and vision science.
Much of the research in social vision is based on the prevailing theory that the visual system is particularly attuned to social cues in the environment. More of the human brain is devoted to vision than all other senses combined, and social vision research seeks to understand how humans are able to use vision to accurately perceive characteristics of other individuals such as age, race, gender, and sexual orientation in a short time frame as well as how individual beliefs may bias the way humans perceive said individuals.
Historical development
Social vision was developed as a research field in the early 2000s. The Science of Social Vision, an amalgamation of social vision research, was released in 2010, followed by a special edition issue of Social Cognition in 2013 that focused on social vision. The field developed at the intersection of social psychology and vision science, borrowing techniques from both fields to investigate social perception.
Thin-slice vision
Thin-slice vision refers to the accuracy with which observers are able to correctly identify imperceptible characteristics of a person after watching the individual alone or acting in a group for only a short amount of time. When examining thin-slice vision, researchers provide anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes of recorded behavior to an observer who has no relationship with the recorded individual and no knowledge of the context of the recorded behavior. Thin-slice vision research has found that people are generally more accurate with inferences using visual elements of a scene alone rather than recordings that have both visual and auditory elements; therefore, it focuses exclusively on the use of visual stimuli. In addition, observers tend to be just as accurate in correctly guessing information about an individual in short time segments such as fifteen seconds of perception as they are during longer segments such as fifteen minutes. As a result, thin-slice vision research is argued to be its own unique modality of social perception, separate from auditory perception and relying on very short time frames.
Individual characteristics
Research has consistently demonstrated that thin-slice vision leads to highly accurate perception of individual characteristics. When they were examining personality, observers were able to accurately assess men's extraversion, interpersonal warmth, and sociosexuality levels after they watched a short, silent clip of the men being interviewed. In a different set of studies, observers watched a silent clip of a man entering an empty room, reading a weather report, and then exiting the room; yet they were highly accurate in assessing his masculinity, extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism levels. Additional research has replicated these results while additionally finding that life satisfaction was perceivable in these thin-slices as well. One set of studies conducted in 2003 asked participants to view silenced clips of one minute or less depicting an individual engaging in an informal social interaction and found that observers were able to accurately assess the IQ of the observed person well above a chance. The relative power and status of employees in a company was additionally assessed with high accuracy by observers who were given a one-minute clip of the employees engaging in a puzzle task.