week 3 - social perception

social perception 

• How we understand other people 

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

People decide quickly what others are like based on minimal information 

judgement on phsysical appearance

People form initial impressions based on facial appearance in less than 100 milliseconds.

Baby face - childlike, naive, warm, submissive 

Judge people of physical appearance - cleanliness, features, clothes (social roles). 

Nonverbal communication - facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position etc 

Behaviours and activities

Verbal communication. 

We move quickly from observable info to trait inferences. why?

• Competence 

• Interpersonal qualities 

Happens because: 

• Using personality traits give us lots of information with little effort / words.  Traits are economical (packages lots of information to make 1 impression) 

• Happen automatically - through categorisation of schemas. 

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

Impression formation and thin slicing

• Limited exposure can lead to meaningful impression 

• Thin-slicing: meaningful conclusions based on a brief sample of behaviour. 

• Consequence: although category based social judgements speeds processing time, it often leads to errors (e.g. stereotyping). 

• Evolution pov: quick assumptions increases survival. 

The continuum model of impression formation (dual processing) 

Impressions range from: 

Category-based ————————————————————————————— individuated 

Use category based inferences: easy, quick - judgments made about a person's character, traits, or likely behaviors based primarily on their membership in a social category (e.g., gender, race, age, occupation), rather than on their specific, individual attributes or behaviors. 

Use individuated judgement when: motivated to be accurate, person doesn’t fit our categories, want to know the person better. - involve forming perceptions of a person based on their unique attributes and specific, often counter-stereotypical, details, rather than relying on automatic, effort-minimizing social categories or stereotypes. 

Primacy effect

Primacy effect: when to comes to forming impressions, the 1st traits we perceive in others influence how we view information we learn next 

Belief perseverance

Belief perseverance: tendency to stick with an initial judgement even in the face of new, contradicting information. 

Attribution theory

how people explain the cause of behaviour 

Heider 1958

need to understand and control env leads to attributions. We make attributions when events are negative or unexpected. 

Dispositional or internal attributions

traits/ character, attitudes, enduring internal states 

Situational attributes

external env causing behaviour. 

Kelley - the covariation model 

• To form an attribution about what caused a personal behaviour, we note the pattern between when the behaviour occurs and the presence or absence of possible causable factors. 

• When we attribute behaviours, we take in lots of info about how that attribution varies across time, place, actors. 

• We make couches of internal vs external attributions by using: consensus, distinctiveness, consistency. 

Consistency - Kelly

the extent to which the behaviour between 1 actor and 1 stimulus is constant across time and circumstances. 

Consensus - kelly

the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the sake stimulus as the actors does. 

Distinctiveness - kelly

the extent to which 1 particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli. 

Internal attribution occurs when 

Consistency = high 

Consensus = low

distincitveness = low

External attribution 

Consistency = high 

Consensus = high 

distincitveness = high.

Evaluation of Kelly’s covariation model

Not all info always present. Time to gather data not always accessible. 

Consistency and distinctiveness used more than consensus. 

Attribution biases: 

fundermental attribution error

The actor-observer bias

The self-serving error:

The self-serving error:

explanations for one’s successes credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one’s failures blame external; situational factors. - maintains self esteem, want to make others think well of us and to admire us - if second chance to redo situation available people will be more likely to not have this error, e.g. failing mock test = I need to study more (dispositional). - we know more about the situational factors that affect our own behaviour than we do about other people’s. 

The actor-observer bias

bias that attributes others behaviour to their disposition but our behaviour to the situation. Due to perceptual salience: external cues more aware in our minds than others surrounding cues. Actors have more background info about themselves so know when they are acting out of character

fundermental attribution error

more likely to attribute others behaviour to their dispositions than to the situation. 2-step process of attributions: 1. People make dispositional attributions quickly and automatically. 2. Only later use situational information to discount it on reflection. People don’t tend to get to the second step unless the context is very compelling or salient. Need to consciously think carefully before reaching judgment. Need motivation to reach an accurate judgment. Suspicious about the behaviour e.g. suspected lying. 

Perceptual salience

the seeming importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention. Despite people viewing the same conversation, the influence of whose face you could see during the conversation decides who they believe to have a leading role in that conversation. Those who viewed actor As face said actor A lead the conversation. Those who looked at Actor B said actor B was influencing the conversation. Those who faced both said they were equal in the conversation. 

Belief in a just world:

defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people. Helps us feel safer 

The bias blind spot:

tendency to think people are more susceptible to making attribution errors than you are. 

Culture and perception 

• Individualistic cultures prefer dispositional attributions compared to collectivist cultures who prefer situational attributions. Collectivist cultures take in more of the context of others behaviours in the environment to make a judgement on the focus character. 

• Self serving bias is strongest in United States, some asian cultures display lower levels of self serving bias.  However, More recent studies found that self serving bias can be just as strong in asian samples. 

Display rules: culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviours are appropriate to display. Emblems = non-verbal gestures that have well understood definitions within a given culture, usually having direct translations such as the thumbs up sign. 

6 major emotional expressions are universal

Facial expressions to show anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, sadness are all universal. Encode or express emotions the same way. Decode or interpret with equal accuracy. Helpful for evolution, seeing fear in others helps you stay safe. 

3 reasons decoding can be complicated 

1 - affect blends: facial expressing which in 1 part of the face registers one emotion while another part registers a different emotion 

2 - people may try to mask emotion 

3 - culture.