Perceiving people

Social perception

Social perception

process by which people come to understand one another

Mind perception

process by which people attribute human like mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people.

Identify s/o using high level terms, attribute humanizing thoughts, feelings, intentions

Anger superiority effect

People are quicker to spot and slower to look away from angry faces in a crowd than faces with neutral, non-threatening emotions. Same with disgust.

One may be conditioned by the current state - those fearing rejection and loneliness are quick to spot welcoming faces.

Attribution theories

group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviour.

Personal attributions

attributions to internal characteristics of an actor, s/a ability, personality, mood or effort.

Situational attributions

attributions to factor external to an actor, s/a the task, other people or luck.

task for an attributional theorist is to understand people’s perception of causality.

Correspondent inference theory

predicts that people try to infer from an action whether the act corresponds to an enduring personal trait of the actor.

Person’s degree of choice

Factor 1 in correspondent inference theory - behavior that is freely chosen is more informative about a person than behavior that is coerced by the situation.

Expectedness of Behavior

Factor 2 in correspondent inference theory - an action tells us more about a person when it departs from the norm than when it is typical, part of a social role, or otherwise expected under the circumstance.

Intended effects

Factor 3 in correspondent inference theory - acts that produce many desirable outcomes do not reveal a person’s specific motives as clearly as acts that produce only a single desirable outcome.

Kelly’s covariation theory

This theory counters correspondence inference theory because behavior can also be attributed to situational factors

Covariation principles

A principle of attribution theory holds that people attribute their behavior to factors that are present when the behaviour occurs and absent when it does not.

Consensus information

to see how different persons react to the same stimulus.

Distinctiveness info

To see how the same person reacts to different stimuli. If stranger is generally critical of other films, then the target behavior is high in distinctiveness and is attributed to stimulus.

Consistency info

to see what happens to the behavior at another time when the person and stimulus both remain the same.

• Behavior that is consistent is attributed to the stimulus when consensus and distinctiveness are also high.

Cognitive heuristics

information processing rule of thumb that enables one to think in ways that are quick and easy but often leading to error.

Availability heuristic

tendency to estimate the odds that an event will occur by how easily instances of it pop to the mind.

False consensus effects

By product of availability heuristic - associating with others who are similar to us in important ways. It’s a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors.

This bias is pervasive and people exaggerate the percentage of others who behave similarly or share their views.

Base rate fallacy

people are relatively insensitive to consensus info presented in forms of numerical base rate - social perceptions are influenced more by one vivid life story than by hard statistical facts

Counter factual thinking

tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might have occured by don’t.

Fundamental attribution error

tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behaviour.

Two step process of social perception

Identifying the behaviour and making quick attributions, and then correcting or adjusting that inference to account for situational influences.

More likely to make attribution errors when cognitively busy or distracted - second step suffers the most.

Relational mobility

how much freedom and opportunity a society affords individuals to form new social ties and break old ones based on personal preferences.

Impression formation

process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression.

Information integration theory

impressions formed of others are based on a combination or integration of personal disposition and the current state of the perceiver and the weighted avg of the target’s personal characteristics.

Perceiver characteristics

set oneself as a standard or frame of reference when evaluating others - perceivers current mood also influences the impression.

Priming effect

tendency for frequently/ recently used concepts to come to mind easily and influence the way new info is interpreted.

automatic priming of behavior is an adaptive social mech that helps one prepare for upcoming encounters with a primed target if one is motivated.

Implicit reasoning theory

a network of assumptions about the relationships among various types of people, traits and behaviours.

Primacy effect

tendency for info presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than info presented later.

Once perceiver thinks they have an accurate impression of someone they pay less attention to subsequent info.

Changing meaning hypothesis

once people have formed an impression, they start to interpret inconsistent info in light of that impression.

Morality

most important warmth related factor in the impressions one forms of the other

Conformation bias

tendency to interpret, seek, and create info in ways that verify existing belief.

Belief perseverance

Tendency to retain one’s initial belief even after they had been discredited.

Once people form a belief, they conjure up explanations that make sense and those explanations help to perpetuate the belief even after it has been discredited.

Self fulfilling prophecy

One’s expectation about a person eventually leads that person behave in ways that confirm those expectations.

Rejection prophecy

People who are fearful of rejection, making them tense and awkward in social situations; their resulting behaviour is off putting to others, which increases the likelihood of rejection and reinforces their initial insecurity.

Belief in a just world

Individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to disparage victims.

Central traits

Traits that exert powerful influence on overall perception.