week 6: Social Perception

What is ‘social perception’?

• Def: refers to constructing an understanding of the social world from the data we get from our senses (or, to the processes by which we form impressions of other people’s traits and personalities)

What is ‘social attribution’?

• Def: try to understand the cause of someone else’s behavior 

  • We observe others' behaviors and then infer backward to internal or external causes to explain why people act the way that they do. 

What basic mental process is involved in social perception and attribution?

• The basic mental process involved in social perception and attribution are not passive activities and we use categorization (our tendency to perceive stimuli as members of groups or classes), we don’t isolate things 

What are ‘prototypes’?

• Def: an abstraction that represents the typical or quintessential instance of a class or group

  • Used for comparison 

  • Prototypes are specified in terms of a set of common attributes among members of a category 

What are ‘schemas’ and what are the major types of ‘schemas’?

• Category prototypes relate to schemas 

• Def: basic forms or sketches - usually include information about an entity’s attributes and about its relations with other entities. 

• Major types of schemas: 

  • Person: cognitive structures that describe the personalities of others and enable us to develop expectations about others’ behavior

  • Self: structures that organize our conception of our own characteristics 

  • Group (or stereotypes): schemas regarding the members of a particular social group or social category 

  • Role: which attributes and behaviors are typical of person’s occupying a particular role in a group

Event (scripts): schemas regarding important social events

What are the advantages of ‘schematic processing’?

• We use schematic processing as a way to efficiently organize, understand, and react to the complex world around us 

• We have to find a way to focus on what is most important in defining the situation

1. They influence recall by making certain kinds of facts more salient and easier to remember 

2. They help us process information faster

3. They guide our inferences and judgements 

4. They allow us to reduce ambiguity 

What is schematic memory, inference and judgment?

• Schematic memory: organize information in memory and affect what we remember and what we forget 

  • People often better remember facts that are consistent with their schemas 

• Schematic inference: they supply missing facts when gaps exist in our knowledge

  • We fill in the gaps by inserting suppositions consistent with our schema 

• Schematic judgement: schemas can influence our judgements or feelings about persons and other entities 

  • Organized in evaluative dimensions 

What is the ‘complexity-extremity effect’?

• Def: less complex schemas lead to more extreme judgements and evaluations 

• Person’s schema for their own in group are more complex than the schemas for out groups which means that there will be more extreme judgements from out-group members 

What are the disadvantages of ‘schematic processing’?

1. Confirmation bias: people are overly accepting of information that is consistent with a belief and ignoring information that is inconsistent with the belief. 

2. When faced with missing information, people fill in the gaps with knowledge by adding elements that are consistent with their schemas. These added elements can turn out to be erroneous or factually incorrect. 

3. People are reluctant to discard or revise their schemas, they occasionally apply schemas to persons or events even when the schemas do not fit the facts. Forced misapplication can lead to incorrect characterization and inferences.

What is ‘confirmation bias’?

• Def: people are overly accepting of information that is consistent with a belief and ignoring information that is inconsistent with the belief. 

What is ‘implicit personality theory’?

• Def: a set of unstated assumptions about which personality traits are correlated 

  • Makes assumptions about behaviors that are associated with various personality traits. 

  • Ex: a person who is outgoing is also friendly

What is a ‘group stereotype’?

• Def: a set of stereotypes that is attributed to all or some members of a specific group or category 

  • Encourages inferences about individuals based on the groups in which they belong to 

  • Leads to overgeneralization (all members of a specific group contain all those attributes that are applied to that group.) 

What are some consequences of stereotyping?

Stereotypes can lead to discrimination, denial of rights, resources and opportunities

What are the three cognitive processes of ‘selective perception’?

• Persons notice only the behavior that support their stereotypes 

• Persons dismiss observed counter evidence counter evidence as being an exception to the rule 

• Persons evaluate similar behaviors differently due to group affiliation 

According to M.B Fallin Hunzaker, how are negative stereotypes related to

others’ experience of adversity?

• Negative stereotypes act as a readily available cultural resource used by individuals to justify others’ experience of adversity 

According to Penny Edgell et al., what negative stereotypes are associated

with atheists?

• Americans are less likely to accept atheists with no signs of increasing acceptance and some people view them as problematic because they associate them with illegality with things such as drugs and prostitution. Others see them as rampant materialists and elitists who threaten the values of society. 

What is a ‘dispositional attribution’?

• Attributing a person’s behavior to the internal states of the person 

What is a ‘situational attribution’?

• Attributing a person’s behavior to factor a person’s environment 

What is the ‘fundamental attribution error’?

• This refers to the tendency to overestimate the importance of personal (dispositional) factors and to underestimate situational influences 

What is ‘self-serving bias’?

• People tend to take credit for acts that yield positive outcomes, whereas they deflect blame for bad outcomes and attribute them to external causes.

What is ‘locus of control’?

• A social psychological concept closely related to the attributions that we make for success and failure (perceived cause of events in one’s life) 

What is an ‘internal locus of control’ and an ‘external locus of control’?

• Internal locus of control: if an individual believes that they have control over many of their life outcomes 

• External locus of control: when an individual feels powerless over such outcomes

What is ‘learned helplessness’?

• When individuals focus on past failures and conclude that they are incapable of achieving success