SocPsy 2nd Exam

Social Perception

is the processes by which people come to understand one another. The social perceiver comes to know others through the indirect clues or elements.

persons, situations, and behavior.

These clues arise from an interplay of three sources

Franz Gall

introduced a carnival-like science **Phrenology**, he claimed that he could assess a person’s character by the shape of his or her skull.

William Sheldon (1954)

psychologist that concluded from flawed studies of adult men that there is a strong link between physique and personality.

Physical Appearance

Our first impressions are influenced in subtle ways by a person’s height, weight, skin color, hair color, tattoos, piercings, eyeglasses, and other aspects of physical appearance. We also form impressions of people that are often accurate based on a host of indirect telltale cues.

Physiognomy

the art of reading character from faces. As people read traits from faces, at times they read traits into faces based on prior information.

Leslie Zebrowitz and Joann Montepare (2005)

conclude that baby-facedness “profoundly affects human behavior in the blink of an eye”.

evolution

Human beings are programmed by _____ to respond gently to babyish features so that real babies are treated with tender loving care.

Scripts

preset notions about certain types of situations that enable us to anticipate the goals, behaviors, and outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting.

Angela Leung and Dov Cohen (2011)

similar socials scripts can be found in other cultures, where a greater value is placed on face and dignity.

Situations

Knowledge of social settings provides an important context for understanding other people’s verbal and nonverbal behavior

Behavior

We derive meaning from our observations by dividing the continuous stream of human behavior into discrete “units.”

Mind Perception

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

The Silent Language of Nonverbal Behavior

behavior that reveals a person’s feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues.

Charles Darwin (1872)

proposed that the face expresses emotion in ways that are both innate and understood by people all over the world.

happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.

There are six “primary” emotions:

Eyes

have been called the “windows of the soul.” A particularly powerful form of nonverbal communication.

Sigmund Freud

no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Ekman and Friesen

proposed that some channels of communication are difficult for deceivers to control, whereas others are relatively easy.

the spoken word, the face, the body, and the voice.

There are four channels of communication that provide potentially relevant information:

Detecting Truth and Deception

in detecting lies, there is no one behavioral cue that can be used to signal deception.

Inner Dispositions

stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities. Since we cannot actually see dispositions, we infer them indirectly from what a person says and does.

Attribution Theory (Heider)

we are all scientists of a sort. Motivated to understand others well enough to manage our social lives, we observe, analyze, and explain their behavior. The explanations we come up with are called attributions and the theory is what describes the process.

Personal Attribution

attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort.

Situational Attribution

attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck.

to understand people’s perceptions of causality.

task for the attribution theorist is not to determine the true causes of such an event but rather

Correspondent Inference Theory (Edward Jones and Keith Davis (1965))

people try to understand others by observing and analyzing their behavior. It predicts that people try to infer from an action whether the act corresponds to an enduring personal trait of the actor.

Choice, Expectedness of Behavior, Effects or Consequences of Someone’s Behavior

People make inferences on the basis of three factors:

Choice

behavior that is freely chosen is more informative about a person than behavior that is coerced by the situation.

Expectedness of Behavior

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 circumstances.

Effects or Consequences of Someone’s Behavior

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

Covariation Theory (Kelley’s)

behavior can be attributed not only to personal factors but to situational factors as well.

covariation principle

in order for something to be the cause of a behavior, it must be present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not.

Consensus Information

Distinctiveness Information

Consistency Information

Three kinds of covariation information:

Consensus Information

To see how different persons react to the same stimulus. If behavior is high in consensus, then it is attributed to the stimulus. If behavior is low in consensus, then it is attributed to the person.

Distinctiveness Information

To see how the same person reacts to different stimuli. If behavior is high in distinctiveness, then it is attributed to the stimulus. If behavior is low in distinctiveness, then it is attributed to the person.

Consistency Information

To see what happens to the behavior at another time when the person and the stimulus both remain the same. Behavior that is consistent is attributed to the stimulus when consensus and distinctiveness are also high and to the person when they are low. In contrast, behavior that is low in consistency is attributed to transient circumstances.

We vary in the extent to which we believe that human behaviors are caused by personal traits that are fixed or by characteristics that are malleable.

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Some of us are more likely than others to process new information in ways that are colored by self-serving motives.

Two ways that social perceivers differ:

Attribution Biases (Kahneman)

System 1 is quick, easy, and automatic using a process that one might call “intuitive.”

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System 2 is slow, controlled, and requires attention and effort—using a process that feels more reasoned.

people take mental shortcuts, cross their fingers, hope for the best, and get on with life. The problem is that speed brings bias and perhaps even a loss of accuracy.

As social perceivers, we are limited in our ability to process all relevant information, or we lack the kinds of training needed to employ fully the principles of attribution theory. That is why

Cognitive Heuristics

Availability Heuristic

False-consensus Effect

Base-rate fallacy

Counterfactual Thinking

The shortcuts and their consequences:

Cognitive Heuristics

s This is the information-processing rules of thumb that enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that often lead to error.

Availability Heuristic

A tendency to estimate the odds that an event will occur by how easily instances of it pop to mind. Our estimates of likelihood are heavily influenced by events that are readily available in memory.

False-consensus Effect

A tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors.

Base-rate fallacy

the fact that people are relatively insensitive to numerical base rates, or probabilities; they are influenced more by graphic, dramatic events.

Counterfactual Thinking

a tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might have occurred but did not. Counterfactual thinking does not necessarily lead people into a sense of regret.

Laura Kray and others (2010)

note that reflecting on “what might have been” can sometimes help us to define ourselves as well as the meaning in our lives.

Education, Career, Romance

Domains of life that trigger the most counterfactual thinking:

The Fundamental Attribution Error

This is when people explain the behavior of others, they tend to overestimate the role of personal factors and overlook the impact of situations.

Samuel Sommers (2011)

Situation Matters, people are profoundly influenced by the situational contexts of their behavior

two-step model

predicts that personal attributions are automatic but that the later adjustment for situational factors requires conscious thought, the second step suffers more than the first.

two-step model

First, we identify the behavior and make a quick personal attribution; then we correct or adjust that inference to account for situational influences.

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Second requires attention, thought, and effort.

First, without realizing it, people often form impressions of others based on a quick glimpse at a face or fleeting sample of behavior.

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Second, perceivers are more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error when they are cognitively busy, or distracted, as they observe the target person than when they pay full attention.

Several research findings support two-step model hypothesis

Culture and Attribution

Western “individualist” cultures (whose members tend to believe that persons are autonomous, motivated by internal forces, and responsible for their own actions)

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non-Western “collectivist” cultures (whose members take a more holistic view that emphasizes the relationship between persons and their surroundings), are likely to influence the attributions people make.

Ara Norenzayan and Richard Nisbet

note that cultural differences in attribution are founded on varying folk theories about human causality. Western cultures, they note, emphasize the individual person and his or her attributes, whereas East Asian cultures focus on the background or field that surrounds that person.

bicultural in their identity

retaining some ancestral manners of thought while adopting some of the lifestyles and values of their new homeland.

Motivational Biases

our social perceptions are sometimes colored by personal hopes, needs, wishes, and preferences

Wishful Seeing

people have a tendency to see what they want to see

Need for Self-esteem

People have a strong need for selfesteem, a motive that can lead us to make favorable, selfserving, and one-sided attributions for our own behavior. With this, people seek more information about their strengths than about weaknesses, overestimate their contributions to group efforts, exaggerate their control, and predict an optimistic and rosy future. This positivity bias in attributions is ubiquitous.

Dunning

stated that the need for self-esteem can bias social perceptions in other subtle ways too, even when we don’t realize that the self is implicated. As such, people tend to judge favorably others who are similar to themselves rather than different on key characteristics. Additionally, sometimes ideological motives can color our attributions for the behavior of others

Melvin Lerner

argues that the tendency to be critical of victims stems from our deep-seated belief in a just world. people need to view the world as a just place in which we “get what we deserve” and “deserve what we get”—a world where hard work and clean living always pay off and where laziness and a sinful lifestyle are punished.

Information Integration Theory (Anderson 1981)

impressions formed of others are based on a combination, or integration, of

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(1) personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver

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(2) a weighted average, not a simple average, of the target person’s characteristics

Impression formation

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

Summation model of impression formation

indicates that the more positive traits there are, the better and impressive.

The averaging model of impression formation

demonstrates that the higher the average value of all the various traits, the better and impressive.

Perceiver Characteristics

Each of us differs in terms of the kinds of impressions we form of others. Whatever the attribute people try to measure, each of us is more likely to notice certain traits than others. Part of the reason for differences among perceivers is that we tend to use ourselves as a standard, or frame of reference, when evaluating others. A perceiver’s current mood state can also influence the impressions formed of others.

Embodiment Effects

the way we view ourselves and others is affected by the physical position, orientation, sensations, and movements of our bodies.

Physical sensations of warmth and cold: The language we use tells us that people equate physical and social temperature—as when we describe someone as having a “warm personality” or “giving the cold shoulder.”

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These embodiment effects may be rooted in the brain. Social neuroscience research shows that physical warmth and social closeness activate neural activity in the same region: The structure that regulates body temperature may also regulate feelings of social warmth.

Embodiment effects in social perception:

Priming effects

The combined effects of stable perceiver differences, fluctuating moods, and bodily sensations point to an important conclusion: To some extent, impression formation is in the eye of the beholder. The characteristics we tend to see in other people also change from time to time, depending on recent experiences.

Priming

The tendency for frequently or recently used concepts or words to come to mind easily and influence the way we interpret new information.

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Our motivations and even our social behaviors are also subject to the automatic effects of priming without awareness. The link between perception and behavior is automatic; it happens like a mindless reflex.

Target Characteristics

individuals can reliably be distinguished from one another along five broad traits, or factors: extroversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

The valence of a trait

whether it is considered good or bad— also influences its impact on our final impressions.

negativity bias

the tendency for negative information to weigh more heavily on our impressions than positive information.

innuendo effect

people drew negative inferences about the dimension that was omitted.

(1) implicit theories of personality

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(2) the order in which we receive information about one trait relative to other traits.

Two other contextual factors are also particularly important:

Implicit Personality Theories

a network of assumptions about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors. Knowing that someone has one trait leads us to infer that he or she has other traits as well.

Solomon Asch (1946)

was the first to discover that the presence of one trait often implies the presence of other traits.

Central traits

traits imply the presence of certain other traits and exert a powerful influence on final impressions.

Geoffrey Goodwin

argues that morality is not just a third facet of social perception, but rather that it is the most important factor in the impressions we form of others.

Moral Character Questionnaire (Erik Helzer and others)

people were asked to rate the extent to which various brief statements accurately described the self, a friend, an acquaintance, and a family member

The Primacy effect information

often has greater impact when presented early in a sequence rather than late. Once perceivers think they have formed an accurate impression of someone, they tend to pay less attention to subsequent information.

Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster

some people are more likely than others to “seize” upon and “freeze” their first impressions.

low in need for closure

are open-minded, deliberate, and perhaps even reluctant to draw firm conclusions about others

high in the need for closure

tend to be impulsive and impatient and to form quick and lasting judgments of others.

Change-of-meaning hypothesis

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

Asch and Henri Zukier (1984)

presented people with inconsistent trait pairs and found that they used different strategies to reconcile the conflicts.

confirmation biases

tendencies to interpret, seek, and create information in ways that verify existing beliefs.

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Once people make up their minds about something— even if they don’t have all the necessary information— they become more and more unlikely to change their minds when confronted with new evidence.

Perseverance of Beliefs

This is a tendency to retain to one’s initial beliefs even after they had been discredited.

Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing

Social perceivers are not passive recipients of information. Like detectives, we ask questions and actively search for clues. But do we seek information objectively or are we inclined to confirm the suspicions we already hold?

Jerker Denrell (2005)

even when we form a negative first impression of someone on the basis of all available evidence and even when we interpret that evidence accurately, our impression may be misleading. The reason is **biased experience sampling**.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

a perceiver’s expectation can actually lead to its own fulfillment. The process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectation.

1) The perceiver forms an impression of a target person, which may be based on interactions with the target or on other information.

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2) The perceiver behaves in a manner that is consistent with that first impression.

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3) The target person unwittingly adjusts his or her behavior to the perceiver’s actions. The net result is behavioral confirmation of the first impression

Three step process of self-fulfilling prophecy:

Self-verification

is most likely to occur when the expectations of perceivers clash with a target person’s own self-concept.

**The process is quick and relatively automatic.** At the drop of a hat, without much thought, effort, or awareness, people make rapid-fire snap judgments about others based on physical appearance, preconceptions, cognitive heuristics, or just a hint of behavioral evidence.

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**The process is far more mindful**. People observe others carefully and reserve judgment until their analysis of the target person, behavior, and situation is complete. As suggested by theories of attribution and information integration, the process is eminently logical.

two radically different views of social perception:

Racism

Define as prejudice and discrimination based on a person’s racial background.

Individual Level

any of us can be racist toward anyone else.

Institutional and Cultural Levels

some people are privileged while others are disadvantaged.

Systemic racism

concerns these institutional and cultural levels of racial discrimination.

Old-fashioned racism

blatant, explicit, and unmistakable.

Modern racism

a subtle form of prejudice that tends to surface when it is safe, socially acceptable, or easy to rationalize.