Nalini Ambady b. 1959
Psychology professor Nalini Ambady was a social
psychologist and leading expert on nonverbal behaviour and interpersonal
perception. Her findings have had important implications for the areas of
personality judgment, impression formation, and nonverbal behaviour. Her
research found that humans perceive nonverbal cues in response to novel people
or situations, and that the information gleaned from an instant impression is
often as powerful as information gained by getting to know a situation or
person over a longer period of time. This ‘thin slicing’ a term she coined with
Robert Rosenthal, refers to these instantaneous non-verbal cues. Ambady's thin
slicing experiments include interesting finding for students’ ratings of
teachers, sexual orientation and clinical-patient interaction.
Read Ambady, N., Hallahan, M and Conner, B (1999) Accuracy
of judgements of sexual orientation from thin slices of behaviour. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 538-47