Taxonomy of human social perception

Abstract

AbstractIn everyday life, humans encounter complex social situations that need to be encoded effectively to allow seamless interaction with others. Yet, principles organizing the perception of social features from the external world remain poorly characterised. We presented 234 movie clips containing various social situations to 1140 participants and asked them to evaluate the presence of 138 social features in each movie clip. We first addressed how social features perceived as binary (present or absent) or continuously (intensity) and how consistently people perceive them. This analysis revealed that some social features were perceived as binary while others on a continuous scale. Simple and immediately relevant social features were perceived most consistently across participants. To establish the low-dimensional perceptual organization for social features, we used principal coordinate analysis and consensus hierarchical clustering for the full dataset of social feature ratings. Dimension reduction using principal coordinate analysis showed that the social perceptual space can be represented with eight main dimensions while hierarchical clustering showed that social perception organizes hierarchically from the main dimensions. The results generalized across different datasets with different stimuli and participants. Altogether the results establish the taxonomy of human social perception, suggesting that emotional valence, dominance, and cognitive versus impulsive functioning are the most fundamental dimensions in social perception.