Behavioral Sciences: Social Thinking (10.2)

Social perception

• Social cognition

• Gives tools to make impressions and judgments regarding others

Attributions

• Explanations for the causes of a person’s actions

Three components of social perception

• Perceiver

• Target

• Situation

Perceiver

• Influenced by

  • Experiences

    • Past experiences affect our attitudes towards current and future experiences → expectations formed

  • Motives

    • Influence what we deem important and choose to ignore

  • Emotional states

    • Can impact interpretations of an event

Target

• Person about which the perception is made

• Knowledge of the target can be past experiences or specific info that affect the perception

Situation

• A given social context

• Can determine what information is available to the perceiver

Primacy effect

• First impressions are often ore important than subsequent impressions

Recency effect

• The most recent information we have about an individual is the most important in forming our impressions

Reliance on central traits

• Organizing the perception of others based on traits and personal characteristics of the target that are most relevant to the perceiver

Implicit personality theory

• Categories we place others in during first impression formation

• Sets of assumptions people make about how different types of people, their traits, and their behavior are related

Stereotyping

• Making assumptions about people based on the category in which they are placed

Halo effect

• Cognitive bias in which judgments about a specific aspect of an individual can be affected by one’s overall impression of the individual

• Tendency to allow a general impression influence other, more specific evaluations about a person

  • Ex: “I like Jin” → “Jin is a good person, Jin is trustworthy, Jin can do no wrong”

• Attractiveness can also produce the halo effect

Just-World hypothesis

• Good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people

• Consequences may be attributed to a universal restoring force (karma, in some cultures)

• Increases the likelihood of “blaming the victim” — worldview denies the possibility of innocent victims

Self-serving bias

• Individuals credit their own successes to internal factors and blame their failures on external factors

• Used to protect our self-esteem

• Motivated by self-enhancement and self-verification

  • Self-enhancement

    • Need to maintain self-worth

  • Self-verification

    • Seeking companionship of others who see them as they see themselves

• Influenced by cognitive processes

  • Emotion (impacts self-esteem)

  • Relationships to others

In-group bias

• Inclination to view members in one’s group more favorably

Out-group bias

• Inclination to view individuals outside one’s group harshly

Attribution theory

• Describes how individuals infer the causes of other people’s behavior

• Fritz Heider

  • Dispositional (internal) attributions

  • Situational (external) attributions

Dispositional attributions

• Relate to the person whose behavior is being considered

  • Beliefs

  • Attitudes

  • Personality characteristics

Situational attributes

• Relate to the features of the surroundings

  • Threats

  • Money

  • Social norms

  • Peer pressure

• Consider the characteristics of the social context rather than the characteristics of the individual as the primary cause

Consistency cues

• Behavior of a person over time

• More regular behavior→ more associated with person’s motives

Consensus cues

• Extent to which a person’s behavior differs from others

• Dispositional attribution formed if person deviates from expected behavior

Distinctiveness cues

• Extent to which a person engages in similar behavior across a series of similar scenarios

• Situational attribution formed if person deviates from expected behavior

Correspondent inference theory

• Focuses on the intentionality of others’ behavior

• If person exhibits behavior that helps or hurts us, we explain it with dispositional attribution

• Correlate unexpected actions with person’s personality

Fundamental attribution error

• Biased towards making dispositional attributions over situational ones

• Ex: if working on a team project and no one completes their sections, we may assume the other members are just lazy or unreliable—not that they got ill, suffered a personal tragedy, etc.

• Can be positive too — if you see someone get out their car to help an elder cross the street, we may assume they’re a kind stranger rather than someone just helping their grandparent

• Dispositional attributions tend to provide simpler explanations; easier than speculation

Attribute substitution

• Individuals must make judgments in complex situations but make substitutions to make things simpler

• Ex: judging the sizes of figures in an image with perspective; color in optical illusions

Cultural attribution

• Individualist cultures

  • Put high value on the individual, personal goals, and independence

  • Tend to make more fundamental attribution errors

  • Dispositional factors

• Collectivist cultures

  • Put high value on belonging in a group and value conformity and interdependence

  • Situational factors