04 Social Perception

Tufts University, Arielle Allen, Fall26

social perception

the cognitive process of gathering, interpreting, and organizing information about other people to make judgements about their thoughts, feelings, and intentions

nonverbal communication

the way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally without words (including via facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position, movement, touch and gaze)

encode

to express or emit nonverbal behavior (ex. smiling or patting someone on the back)

decode

to interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express (deciding that the pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness)

display rules

culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display (ex. social norms regarding men crying)

emblems

nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture, usually having direct verbal translations (ex. thumbs up)

thin slicing

drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality/skills based on a brief sample of behavior

confirmation bias

the tendency to interpret, seek, and even create information that verifies existing beliefs

primacy effect

(regarding first impressions) the first traits we perceive in others influences how we view information that we learn about them later

belief persevereance

the tendency to stick with an initial judgment even when presented with new informatin that should prompt us to reconsider

making attributions

inferences we make about the cause of a behavior (paint the entirety)

situational (external) attributions

inferences that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation they are in, with the assumption that most people would respond the same way in that situation

dispositional (internal) attributions

inferences that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the person such as attitude, character, or personality

attribution theory

a group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of others behavior (or events)

Correspondent Inference Theory

a way of understanding how people decide whether someone’s behavior reflects who they are or if it’s influenced by the situation

Covariation Theory/Model

a theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a persons behavior, we notice patterns between when the behavior occurs and the presence or absence of possible causal factors

Covariation information

whether the person is acting in connecting with who they are, what other people like them do, or is it situational

consensus information

the extent to which other people behave the same way towards the same stimulus as the actor does (diff target, same stimulus)

distinctiveness information

the extent to which a particular actor behaves in the same way towards a different stimuli (same target, different stimulus)

consistency information

the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances (same target, same stimulus)

halo effect

perceiver’s impression of one attribute influences perception of other attributes (can be positive or negative)

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

the tendency to focus on the role of personality and to fail to account for the situation when explaining the behaviors of others

Just World Belief

a defensive attribution wherein people assume… “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people”

perceptual salience

the more noticeable something is, the more we use that to infer/base our assumptions from OR the seeming importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention

attributional stability

we factor personal attributions because they are more stable (we feel more stable believing that we could predict outcomes)

Two-Step Attribution process

analyzing behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior

self-serving attributional biases

the tendency to make dispositional (internal) attributions about your successes and situational (external) attributions about your failures

actorr-observer effect

we tend to observe more dispositional attributions for others and situationattributions for ourselves

bias blind spot

the tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking that we are

Holistic thinking style

a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other (common in east Asian cultures)

analytic thinking style

a type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context (common in western cultures)