Chapter 4: Social Perception

Social Perception: How we come to understand other people

Social Perception

The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people

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, such as smiling or patting someone on the back

Decode

To interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express, such as deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness

Affect Blends

Facial expressions in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion

Display Rules

Culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display

Emblems

Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture, usually having direct verbal translations, such as the thumbs-up sign

Thin-Slicing

Drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior

Primacy Effect

When it comes to forming impressions, the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information that we learn about them later

Belief Perseverance

The tendency to stick with an initial judgment even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider

Attribution Theory

A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior

Internal Attribution

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

External Attribution

The inference 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

Covariation Model

A theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person’s behavior, we note the pattern between when the behavior occurs and the presence or absence of possible causal factors

Consensus Information

The extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does

Distinctiveness Information

The extent to which a particular actor behaves in the same way toward different stimuli

Consistency Information

The extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors

Perceptual Salience

The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention

Two-Step Attribution Process

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

Self-Serving Attributions

Explanations for one’s successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one’s failures that blame external, situational factors

Belief in a Just World

A defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people

Bias Blind Spot

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