Save the Last Dance for Me: Dynamic Cues and Social Perception

Social Perception is the process by which humans make decisions about social relationships. The
perception of attractiveness, warmth, competence and many other social factors occur in almost all
social interactions. People we meet are constantly making decisions based on their perception of what
we do, how we move and look.
Previous studies on factors that influence social perceptions made about attractiveness, warmth and
competence have heavily relied on using static cues as stimuli, like pictures. However, in actual social
settings, perception does not occur based on static stimuli, instead social perception strongly relies on
dynamic cues like walking and dancing.
This inter-disciplinary research aims to study the role of dynamic cues like walking and dancing as
opposed static cues like pictures, on the social perception of attractiveness, warmth and competence.
The research will use motion-capture technology to capture the movements of walking and dancing from
participants, which will be used as the stimuli for raters who will rate the stimuli on attractiveness,
warmth and competence.
Walking is chosen to be studied as it is the most common dynamic factors that are present in social
situations that affect social perception. Dancing offers a further paradox. While sexual dimorphism is
generally attractive in terms of the face, voice, etc., traditionally feminine qualities such as grace and
finesse are emphasized in dance. This project will test whether sexual dimorphism is associated with
attractiveness in dancing, unlike other dynamic or static cues; hence whether dance blurs the
distinctions between masculinity and femininity.