Alignment and Belonging in the Sociolinguistic Interview

This chapter examines five first meetings of the author (an Anglo-Australian researcher), a Javanese research assistant, and five Javanese study participants. The meetings were interviews within a larger project, which explored how Indonesian youth used language styles to enact an identity known as gaul (literally, “sociable”). In the current chapter, the author reviews transcripts of these meetings and highlights how the research assistant facilitates rapport and orients him (the researcher) and the participants (the researched) to youth identity as a stance object (cf. Du Bois, 2007). The research assistant often does this through a series of rhetorical moves that enable interview participants to achieve role alignment as “researcher” and “researched,” respectively. This chapter shows how such role alignment is an interactional process, which often entails snap judgments about interactional preferences, common ground, and moral concerns. These judgments may be recognized as acts of belonging, which interactants must tend to quickly, to establish rapport and to collect good data. Yet, this chapter ends by pointing out some of the perils of negotiated alignment and belonging, and how discursive moves to establish rapport can, in fact, lead to the collection of less-than-best data.

The Psychology of Creating Persons

Starting from the hero Jon Snow, in Game of Thrones, this chapter turns to several traditions of psychology to show the cognitive processes by which people put together small pieces of information in order to see others as “persons.” Public characters are a prominent special case of this process. According to affect control theory, strength, morality, and activity represent three basic dimensions along which people judge others—and build them into characters in public arenas. People make snap judgments about others’ morality and strength, and move away from these judgments reluctantly and slowly in the face of contrary evidence. People tend to see more consistency and coherence in others than the evidence warrants.

Evaluating the Benefits of Conscious and Unconscious Thought in Complex Decision Making

Decision-making research reports mixed findings about the best way to make complex decisions involving multiple criteria. While some researchers emphasize the importance of conscious thought to make good decisions, others encourage people to stop thinking and trust their snap judgments. Still others recommend a distracting activity prior to making a choice, assuming that unconscious processing of the decision problem occurs during distraction. We review studies comparing these three decision modes. We show that conscious deliberation helps people to make good decisions when people have in mind precise verbatim information about the exact features of each alternatives. By contrast, a distraction period is more useful when meaning-based gist representations of the alternatives are accessible. Finally, while a period of distraction or deliberation is beneficial for decision making under certain conditions, to blindly follow one’s gut feeling is never the right solution.

Feedback shapes snap judgments: Toward a dynamic model of making social judgments

In two studies, we undermined participants' confidence in snap judgments regarding others' morality based on facial photos by using an interactive computer program in which No, Low, or High Accuracy feedback was given. Study 1 demonstrated that in comparison to a No Feedback condition, Low Accuracy feedback led to increased time spent in generating further snap judgments and undermined beliefs regarding the reliability of one's social judgments. Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 and further showed that such an increase in time spent on generating subsequent snap judgments is evident primarily among participants whose preliminary snap judgments were long, as measured at baseline. Undermined confidence in snap judgments increased reluctance to make snap judgments about new targets' morality, but had no impact on willingness to make snap judgments about these new targets' other characteristics that were unrelated to morality. These findings demonstrate that making snap judgments is a dynamic process that is continuously shaped by external feedback.

A reason to avoid SNAP judgments

Study reveals that the SNARE protein SNAP23 has opposing functions in exocrine and endocrine pancreatic cells.