Introspection in Relationships: Why can't we Honestly Judge our Friends' Behaviors?

Is there such a thing as objectively evaluating the behavior of our friends? A recent study conducted by researchers at Technische Universitat Dresden shows that this simply may be impossible. 

"In judging people we already know, we are more or less unable to ignore our previously established images of those people," Daniel Leising of Technische Universität Dresden said, via a press release.

The new study, published today in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, examines how real people evaluate the behavior of themselves, their friends, and strangers. Psychologists know that people hold a number of biases when evaluating others, but most studies to date on this issue have used written descriptions of the behavior of hypothetical persons. "This is one of the few studies that investigated judgments of people's actual behavior."

Leising and colleagues recruited pairs of friends for the study and asked them first to describe each others' personalities and then several days later, videotaped them participating in challenging situations that took place in the lab. These tasks ranged from answering general knowledge questions to role-playing exercises. Then, the participants, their friends and strangers then evaluated the videotapes, each about 90 seconds long. 

"This way, we could compare different views on the exact same behaviors with one another," Leising explains. "If different people watch the exact same videotapes but interpret them differently, then the different interpretations may not be rooted in what they just saw, but must be explained in terms of something else."

Findings of the study showed that people predict how participants would judge their friends' behavior based on what they thought of them in advance, even before watching their videotaped behavior. 

"By statistically controlling for strangers' ratings of the same behavior, we could show that there are two kinds of systematic bias in such behavior judgments," Leising said, via the release. 
"We really like to have our images of persons be consistent," Leising adds. "This is probably beneficial in terms of arriving at an overall image that is representative - for example, if the person's behavior in a situation is very atypical, we could discount it as an exception and not let it influence our overall image of the person much," Leising says. That representative image then allows us to predict people's future behavior. Additionally, he says that the tendency to idealize our friends might serve as a "social glue" that increases social cohesion. "In our evolutionary past, that probably constituted a major advantage in terms of survival."

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.