10/19 Social Perception

Gerald McClearn

Heritability of certain things that were hard to understand through siblings alone

Role of heredity in the environment

Human Genome Project

• 23 pairs of chromosomes; within chromosomes are our genes 

• Average human cell has approximately 20,500 genes 

• Human genome – the complete set of genes contained within each of us 

• New research looking at genes and environment interaction 

Social Psychology 

• extremely broad range of psychologists 

• Look at how the environment influences cognitions, emotions, and behaviors

The primacy effect

an effect that suggests that the first information learned about someone is remembered most, and it influences us more than later learned information (ex. first day of school)  

serial order effect

remember the beginning really well

Self-fulfilling prophecies

an effect that occurs when someone’s expectations change his/her behavior as to increase the probability of the predicted event

Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid phone conversation study — self fulfilling prophecy

• Invited heterosexual males and females to participate in phone conversation w/out having seen the other person 

  • Deception: before males were about to call females, they stopped them and told them that the studies have been pretty awkward, because it is really messing with the data, take a quick snapshot of the woman they were talking to, could not tell the woman they saw her on polaroid

    • Seeing who you were going to speak with would make it easier 

    • Males got 1 of 2 photos – one with a very attractive woman, others got one with unattractive woman 

  • Got ride of the male portion of the conversation, only listened to the female 

    • Took recordings, brought them to independent raters → asked them to guess how attractive each woman was based on conversation

    • Every female paired w/ unattractive rated unattractive by raters

Stereotypes

an over-generalized belief of expectation about a category of people 

• Can be based on both negative and positive concepts 

• Generalizations, when accurate, can be beneficial and necessary. are often problematic 

Prejudice

Unjustified attitude toward a member of a group (usually negative), solely because he/she is a member of that group

Discrimination

•  unfair treatment of a member of a group (usually negative), solely because he/she is a member of that group 

  • Can be based on almost any stereotype (both inaccurate and accurate) and be learned in a very short period of time 

  • Eye of the storm video (follows the work of Jane Elliot from Ricevillw, IA) 

Attributions

the processes that we use in order to assign courses to behavior 

Internal attributions

• explaining behaviors based on the internal characteristics of the perso in question 

  • Skills, motivation, etc

  • Getting F because of own skill 

  • Whole class fails → attributes it to them being dumb 

External attributions

• explaining behaviors based on the situation and surrounding environment 

  • time , teacher, questions 

  • Getting an F because of the teacher, ability to study 

Fundamental attribution error (correspondence bias)

our tendency to put great weight on internal attributions when explaining the behaviors of others 

Castro essay study

• prompted people in to write essays about writing a positive/negative essay about controversial essay 

  • Everyone did do the assignment 

  • After, had each other read eacch others essay 

    • Everyone was forced, but people were under assumption that behavior of individuals in this study wasa byproduct

Actor-observer effect

• the tendency to make internal attributions for the actions of others, while making external attributions for our own actions 

Jonas and nisbett’s self/family member/walter conkite study

• Had people write down own name and name of family member (usually father) 

• Walter conkite – famous newscaster -> explain the random things they 

  • Unless positive 

Self-serving bias

• the tendency to attribute personal failures to the situation, while attributing personal successes to the outseles