Social salience

In social psychology, social salience is the extent to which a particular target draws the attention of an observer by standing out in a social context. The target may be a physical object or a person, and the observer could be an individual or group. If the target is a person, they may be alone or a member of a group (of which the observer may also be a part) or else in a situation of interpersonal communication. It can be based on the way a particular feature can be linked to a certain type of speaker, who is then associated with social and emotional evaluations. These evaluations are then transferred to the linguistic feature.

An observer's attention may be drawn to a target as a result of its certain general features. These features and aspects of a target can make them more or less socially salient, including:

  • General object attributes – vivid colours, object's proximity to observer
  • Difference between the target's attribute and its immediate environment.
  • Difference between observer's expectations of a target and the target's observable attributes.
  • Observer's goal – a target that matches goal-oriented searching.
  • Whether the target is relevant to oneself.
  • Whether the target us dangerous to oneself.
  • Whether the target is attractive, which could be determined by the above features.

Social salience allows for observers to quickly detect changes in their environment. Given the limited cognitive capacity of humans, this is advantageous but can lead to biases and misperceptions as in the case of the representativeness heuristic. Awareness of this heuristic does not always completely mitigate its effect.

Social salience is also distinguished from cognitive salience in the sense that it consists of the variation along with attitudes, cultural stereotypes, and social values associated with it. In addition, the variation has already been used to carry social indexation. On the other hand, cognitive salience pertains to the objective property of linguistic variation that allows language users to pick up on it.

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