EXPLORATION OF THE DETECTABLE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL EPISODES - THE PARSING OF INTERACTION SPECIMENS

We report a series of three studies that jointly examine the applicabi lity of the ecological perspective to social perception. First, we ext ended Newtson's (1973) parsing procedure to the identification of perc eptually detectable action units in three naturalistic video specimens of men attempting to ''pick up'' women in a disco. Observers were abl e to parse the episodes into both large and small action units and to do so under specified conditions with generally high interobserver agr eement. Second, independent observers gave brief verbal descriptions o f each action unit created by the parsing procedure of Study 1, and ac tion units were identified that were common in content and in location across the three specimens. Third, the accuracy and immediacy with wh ich viewers identified the interaction as a ''pickup'' episode were as sessed using five versions of the episode: (a) an intact version, (b) a version containing only those actions found in common in all specime ns, (c) a version containing all actions except those found in common across specimens, (d) a version with all actions but with the common a ctions randomly relocated, and (e) a version with all actions but with the noncommon actions randomly relocated (and the common actions reta ined in their original location). Viewers were much less likely to ide ntify the episode correctly, and reported taking longer to do so, when presented with versions in which common elements had been relocated o r excised; in contrast, viewers' impressions were as accurate and imme diate with the common action versions as with the intact version. Thes e results affirm the applicability of the ecological perspective to th e study of perception in complex social episodes. The next step is to identify the actual content of the invariant structural features.