Hey guys, my first post on this forum, I've been following the forum and thought I would try and give some of my thoughts about peer judgments in general.

My idea is that if sequentially project to your target positive qualities then they will have an overall positive feeling towards you despite perhaps other less flattering specifics that are not noticed.

I think one dominating factor in how people cast judgments is how much time they have and that given a high amount of time pressure in the typical interaction its hard for others to make an accurate judgment. Most people are limited to focusing on one or two things at a time, therefore it doesn't seem to be a far stretch to say the overall feeling for a person is formed by observing one or two things at a time. I suppose once we have clumped together certain factors together and made a judgment on them collectively, they can become a single, more abstract entity to be manipulated in memory.

If a social judgement was a failure, then I think we need to look at which specifics they considered to make the rejection -- i.e. what made them feel uncomfortable, or awkward about the situation. Notice that some of these factors might be external as we often misattribute our state of mind to those around us, particularly when it is an uncomfortable feeling (to believe the bad feeling is due to ourselves contradicts the positive self image we would like to maintain). So we have three categories of factors, those involving you, the target and the environment.

We often don't act because we fear social rejection, that fear of social rejection can influence your actual performance by making you appear nervous when its important to look confident and cocky. Therefore, your expectations of the outcome from your behavior may strongly influences your results.

The devil is almost always in the details. I brainstormed the following possible factors that can influence a social judgment, let me know if you can think of any others.

You:
- Timing
- Confidence
- Social etiquette
- Influence over peers
- Interest from other women
- Charm
- Attention to other person
- Physical location in conversation
- Intentions
- Sense of humor
- Ability to escalate
- Intrinsic motivation vs. Extrinsic (or put another way focusing on steps to achieve the desired versus just thinking about the rewards or rejection)

Target:
- Discomfort
- Feelings of attraction
- Dissonance
- Self-Image
- Motives
- Ideal view of mate (often matches their view of themselves)
- Past experiences
- Schema for this situation
- State of mind
- Familiarity with you
- Past behavior towards you (what you do sometimes becomes what you want and eventually do again)

Environment:
- Noise
- People
- Activities
- Drug use


The idea with these factors is that there is an injection from all of the factors in Environment and You to the factors in Target.

At the end of a successful pickup I sometimes think I have everything figured out, but then I realize that next time my targets attention is focused on a different factor which can change the outcome.

Another thing I like to keep in mind, is that sometimes there is an agent at play that is difficult to verbalize. I think this is best demonstrated by a study I learned about in a social psych class where couples who were told to think about the pros and cons of a relationship were more likely to breakup. The theory presented was that they had trouble verbalizing what they really liked about their partner. It raises a question to test on the field if one of the best BF-destroyer routines is just to have them think objectively about their current partners

My question is:

What other factors and categories can you think of which influence a social interaction? Of course there are thousands of factors, but which in your experience in the field have been the most important?