Personality of the judge in recognition of departure from role expectation

It was proposed that an observer must be unusually sensitive to role requirements to be able to use information from an actor's behavior when he deviates from role expectations in a more subtle way than failing to follow role-playing instructions. Other-directed (interpersonally sensitive) or inner-directed (interpersonally less sensitive) students observed a videotape of a person acting in either a role-consonant or a role-deviant manner. As expected, there was significantly (p < 0.005) less variance among the ratings when other-directed observers viewed role-deviant behavior than in the other three conditions. There was also greater polarization in the ratings of true position of the role-deviant interviewers by the other-directed observers than in the other three conditions (p < 0.01).