Week 3 - Social Perception

Social Perception

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

People form initial impressions…

based on facial appearance in less than 100 milliseconds

Wills & Todorov, 2006

baby faced = childlike, naive, warm, subconscious

What information do we use?

Physical appearance, nonverbal communication, behaviour, verbal communication

We move quickly from observable information to

• trait inferences;

  • Competence

  • Interpersonal qualities

Why does moving to trait inferences happen?

• Traits are economical trait inferences occur automatically (categorization)

• We use implicit personality theories to infer traits from other traits

Thin-slicing

drawing meaningful conclusions about another person's personality or skills based on the extremely brief sample of behaviour

consequences of categorisation

although category-based social judgements speeds processing time, it often leads to errors

We use category-based inference because

easy and quick

• We use individuated information when: 

• Motivated to be accurate

• Person doesn't fit our categories

• Want to know the person better

Primacy effect

when it comes to forming impressions, the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information we learn next

Belief perseverance

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

Attribution theory describes

how people explain the causes of behaviour

Heider (1958)

 need to understand and control the environment leads to attributions

We make attributions when events are…

negative or unexpected

Attribution theory

Dispositional or internal attributions VS situational or external attributions

The Covariation model (Kelley)

To form an attribution about what caused a person's behaviour, we note the pattern between when the behaviour occurs and the presence or absence of possible casual factors

The Covariation model - Focuses on how

behaviour "covaries" - across time, place, actors & targets

We make choices about internal vs external attributions by using 3 pieces of information:

Consensus, distinctiveness, consistency

Consistency

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

Consensus

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

Distinctiveness

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

Internal attributions occur when

consensus low, distinctiveness low, consistency high

External attributions occur when

consensus high, distinctiveness high, consistency high

Evaluation of covariation model

• Information about all 3 dimensions may not be available - people still make attributions

• Consistency and distinctiveness used more than consensus

Research suggests that there are biases in our casual attributions. These biases are:

• Fundamental attribution error

• The actor-observer bias

• The self-serving attribution error

• Belief in a Just World

• The Bias Blind Spot

Fundamental attribution error

we are more likely to attribute other's behaviour to their dispositions than to the situation

People make fundamental attribution error due to

the two-step process of attributions

the two-step process of attributions: first step

people make dispositional attributions automatically

Perceptual salience

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

Taylor and Fiske (1975) procedure

confederates reading a script and ppt were asked to  take judgements about how was leading the conversation.

Taylor and Fiske (1975) results

When they were facing both actors their rating of actors casual role was the same. Those that were facing actor A rated Actor A as leading the conversation and those that were facing actor B rated actor B as leading the conversation

The two-step process of attributions: step 2

Only later use situational information to discount it

People don’t tend to get to the second step of the two-step process of attributions unless

the context is very compelling or salient

People only engage in the second step of the two-step process of attributions if

• You consciously slow down, think carefully before reaching a judgement

• You are motivated to reach an accurate judgement

• You are suspicious about the behaviour

Actor-observer bias (Jones & Nisbett, 1972)

We tend to attribute other's behaviour to their dispositions but ours to situations

Actor-observer bias: perceptual

actors look at the situation, observers look at actors

Why does actor observer bias occur?

Access to different information: actors have more background about themselves

The Self-serving Attribution Error

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

Why do we make self-serving attributions?

• We want to maintain self-esteem

• We want other people to think well of us and to admire us

• We know more about the situational factors that affect our own behaviour than we do about other people's

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

 6 major emotional expressions are universal

1. Anger

2. Happiness

3. Surprise

4. Fear

5. Disgust

6. Sadness

These expressions are universal in the way

• we encode (express these emotions in the same way) and decode (interpret with equal accuracy)

• Ekman et al (1971)

Why decoding facial expressions of emotion can be complicated

Affect blends, people may try to mask emotions, culture

What is affect blends?

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

Culture and nonverbal communication

• Display rules

culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviours are appropriate to display

Culture and nonverbal communication: Emblems

non-verbal Gestures which have clear, well-understood definitions (they are not universal). Usually have a direct translations

Culture and perception - Newman & Bakina (2009)

People in individualist cultures prefer dispositional attributions compared to people in collectivist cultures, who prefer situational attributions

Culture and perception: Self-serving bias is strongest in

the US

Culture and perception (Mezulis et al, 2004)

Some asian cultures display lower level of self-serving bias

Culture and perception (Hu, Zhang, & Ran, 2016)

More recent studies have found that the self-serving bias can be just as strong in asian samples