Thin-slicing is a term used in psychology and philosophy to describe the ability to find patterns in events based only on "thin slices", or narrow windows, of experience.
The term refers to the process of making very quick inferences about the state, characteristics or details of an individual or situation with minimal amounts of information.
Given the limited conditions under which social inference and correction occur, these initial judgments may determine people's ultimate perceptions, evaluations, and theories about those with whom they interact face-to-face.
More specifically, researchers look at how people make judgments based on their observations of others' minor traits such as eye contact, fidgeting, open-handed gestures, stiff posture, smiling, etc.
Thin slices of individuals' behaviors could expose characteristics of their personality, internal states, sexuality, relationship, biases, etc.
[5] In the research paper published in 2007[6] by Dana R. Carney et al., it was discovered that increased exposure time, i.e. length of the slice, helped people to obtain more information, so that they could better judge social approach and positive affect.
Dana R. Carney et al. also drew the conclusion that women tended to make more accurate judgments using thin slicing than did men.
[8] They found out that a few moments of communication evaluation in Speed dating indeed helped the participants to predict outcomes and make speculated assessments of their relationship with the potential mate.
For social media sites, information such as the individual's photo, name, status, high school and gender allowed raters to form predictive impressions while for blogging sites, this predictive information included the individual's photo, religious views, current town, employer and number of groups.
In the second study, sad participants showed reduced accuracy in judging relationship type from thin-slices as well as diminished judgmental efficiency.
[13] One of the first series conducted by James Bugental and his colleagues showed that parents' expectancies, identified from brief clips of their tone, are related to their children's behavior process.
[14] Some people believe that the effects of the phenomenon known as déjà vu happen within the same time frame of thin-slicing and might also have a direct correlation.
A narrow window of experience is enough for an individual to feel sure that they have already witnessed or experienced a current situation, even though the exact circumstances of the prior encounter are uncertain and were perhaps imagined.
Many other uses of thin-slicing are implied by media reports such as firemen making split-second decisions, or cops knowing something is wrong by simply a gut feeling.
The first explanation draws from psychologists Zebrowitz-McArthur and Baron's ecological approach to Social perception,[16] which states that attributes corresponding to an unpleasant or threatening presence can be easily and quickly recognized because the ability to sense danger is essential for survival and adaptive action.
For example, Berry and McArthur found that adults with baby faces are generally perceived to be more honest, naive and kind.
This in turn causes the target individual to modify their own behavior to confirm those expectations and gives the illusion that the person's traits accurately fits the stereotype from the beginning.
For example, physically attractive individuals may become more socially-skilled and confident simply because they internalize the beliefs held by others that they are more socially desirable and outgoing.
[1] Being exposed to only a thin-slice of behavior eliminates the presence of distracting stimuli such as verbal interaction and doesn't allow the rater time to introspectively reason out why they judge an individual a certain way, which may cause them to overthink and change the judgments formed by their initial instincts.
Thin-slicing allows raters to focus on expressive behavior and weeds out extraneous information that can cause judgments to stray away from the truth.
[1] Ambady and Rosenthal's 1992 meta-analysis revealed that a longer exposure time of a thin-slice does not significantly improve accuracy of judgment.
While physical attractiveness of the video subject may seem like an obvious bias that may lead people to form inaccurate judgments, they demonstrated that it actually did not have a strong effect on their experimental outcome.
First, experimenters can reliably use thin-slicing to evaluate different affect variables and can thus save time and money on gathering extraneous information.
Additionally, since thin-slicing can be used to accurately predict interpersonally-oriented qualities, they can be used in the selection, training and evaluation of individuals who require strong interpersonal skills, such as teachers, managers and therapists.
[16] There are now numerous websites[17] containing essays and articles that analyze aspects of group dynamics shown in the movie, using methods analogous to thin-slicing.
Also, students learning group dynamics, social psychology and related topics are usually required to analyze the movie using the thin-slicing method.