Chia-Jung Tsay, Organizational Behavior PhD
Thesis Chair: Max Bazerman
The Impact of Non-verbal and Visual Cues on Judgment, Perceptions, and Outcomes in Performance and Competitive Contexts
Rapid social judgments and impressions are often made on the basis of minimal information, such as nonverbal behaviors and visual cues. Through nonverbal and visual information, thin slices of behavior on the order of seconds and milliseconds in length have been shown to be highly predictive of consequential outcomes ranging from elections to firm financial success. In the domain of music, people consistently report that the most important source of information in evaluating performance is sound; nonetheless, twelve experiments demonstrated that visual information is what people actually rely on when making rapid judgments about music performance. These initial findings were extended in additional experiments elaborating on 1) the generalizability and persistence of such effects throughout domains and levels of analyses, and 2) potential mechanisms such as attention to specific types of non-verbal cues. Further work examines the underlying visual and affective contributions to judgments of performance, the role of expertise in such decision-making, and the implications for organizational performance and outcomes.
