Chapter Four: Perceiving Persons
Social Perception: The processes by which people come to understand one another
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov: Sometimes it takes a mere fraction of a second for you to form impressions of a stranger based on their face
Our first impressions are influenced in subtle ways by a person’s physical appearance
Physiognomy: The art of reading character from faces
Ran Hassin and Yaacov Trope: People prejudge others in photographs as kind-hearted or mean-spirited based on facial features
People can also read traits into faces based on prior information
Adults who have baby-faced features tend to be seen as warm, kind, submissive, etc.
Human beings are programed by evolution to respond gently to babyish features so that real babies are treated with tender care
Leslie Zebrowitz: We associate babyish features with helplessness traits and then overgeneralize this expectation to baby-faced adults
Alexander Todorov: People are quick to perceive unfamiliar faces as more or less trustworthy by focusing on facial features
Seen as trustworthy if they look happy
Seen as untrustworthy if they look angry
Scripts: Preset notions about certain types of situations
Knowledge of social settings provides an important context for understanding other people’s verbal and nonverbal behavior
Our expectations for how situations affect us can influence the way we interpret other people’s facial expressions
Identifying actions from movements is easy and allows us to recognize specific individuals strictly by their movements
We derive meaning from our observations by dividing the continuous stream of human behavior into discrete units
Darren Newtson: Some perceivers break the behavior stream into a large number of fine units, while others break it into a small number of gross units
The manner in which people divide a stream can influence their perceptions
Fine Units: Attended more closely, detected more meaningful events, remembered more details about behavior
Mind Perception: The process by which people attribute humanlike mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people
People who identify someone’s actions in high-level terms rather than low-level terms are more likely to attribute humanizing thoughts to that person
In general, the more humanlike a target object is, the more likely we are to attribute it to qualities of “mind”
Heather Gray: People perceive minds along two dimensions
Agency: A target’s ability to plan and execute behavior
Experience: The capacity to feel pleasure, pain, and other sensations
The more “mind” attributed to a character, the more people like and value it
Will people come to see a humanlike mind in machines?
Nonverbal Behavior: Behavior that reveals a person’s feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues
The face expresses emotion in ways that are both innate and understood by people all over the world
Are basic emotions are universally recognized from the face, or is the link culturally specific?
Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady
Both: We can recognize emotions from all cultures, but people in those cultures are a little more accurate (in-group advantage)
Darwin: The ability to recognize emotion in others has survival value for all members of a species - it is more important to identify some emotions than others
Christine and Ranald Hansen’s anger superiority effect
People are quicker to spot angry faces in a crowd rather than faces with neutral, non-threatening emotions
People recognize the face of disgust and experience it at a neural level
Emoticons filling the gap of nonverbal cues while texting
Eye contact
As social beings, people are highly attentive to eyes, often following the gaze of others
People who look us straight in the eye quickly draw and hold our attention, increase arousal, and activate key social areas of the brain
There is a great deal of cultural variation in nonverbal behavior and common greetings
Ekman and Friesen: Some channels of communication are relatively difficult for deceivers to control, while others are relatively easy
Observers who watched tapes that focused on the body were better than detecting deception than were those who saw tapes focused on the face
Judgements are highly prone to error
There is a mismatch between the behavioral cues that actually signal deception and those we use to detect deception
None of the behavioral cues people look for are very telling
Innocent truth tellers are also likely to exhibit signs of stress
Albert Vrij, Anders Granhag: Lying is harder to do and requires more thinking than telling the truth, so we should induce and focus on behavioral cues that betray cognitive effort
Ask ppl to recount their stories in reverse chronological order
Urge ppl to maintain eye contact
Dispositions: Stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities
Individuals differ in the extent to which they feel a need to explain the events of human behavior
Attribution Theory: A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior
Causal attributions:
Personal Attributions: Internal characteristics such as ability, personality, mood, or effort
Situational Attributions: External factors such as the task, other people, or luck
Jones and Keith Davis - Correspondent Inference Theory: Each of us tries to understand other people by observing and analyzing their behavior
Degree of choice
Expectedness of behavior / is it typical or does it depart from the norm?
Intended effects or consequences of someone’s behavior
Harold Kelley - Covariation Theory: People attribute behavior to factors that are present when a behavior occurs and are absent when it does not
Consensus Information: How different persons react to the same stimulus
Distinctiveness Information: How the same person reacts to different stimuli
Consistency Information: What happens to the behavior at another time when the person and the stimulus both remain the same
Daniel Kahneman: The human mind operates by two different systems of thought
System 1: Quick, easy, and automatic
System 2: Slow, controlled, and effortful
Both systems are active when people are awake
System 2 takes over when something takes effort, System 1 guides us
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
Gives rise to the false-consensus effect (a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors)
Social perceptions are influenced more by one vivid life story than by hard statistical facts
Base-Rate Fallacy: People are relatively insensitive to numerical base rates, or probabilities and are influenced more by graphic, dramatic events
Can lead to various misperceptions of risk
Counterfactual Thinking: A tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might’ve occurred but did not
Kahneman and Miller
If we imagine a result that is better than the actual result, we’re likely to experience disappointment, regret, and frustration
If the imagined result is worse, then we react with emotions that range from relief and satisfaction to elation
Some individuals think in counterfactual terms more than others
People who strongly believe in free will are more likely than those who believe their fate is predetermined/unpredictable
Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior
First, we identify the behavior and make a quick personal attribution, then we correct or adjust that inference to account for situational influences
First step is simple and automatic
Second step requires attention, thought, and effort
American participants made more personal attributions, Indians made more situational attributions
People in the upper social classes are more likely than those in the lower classes to see behavior in general as caused by internal personal traits
Western cultures emphasize the individual person and their attributes
East Asian cultures focus on the background or field that surrounds that person
It is possible for us to hold differing cultural worldviews at the same time and to perceive others through either lens, depending on which culture is brought to mind
Our social perceptions are sometimes colored by personal hopes, needs, wishes, and preferences
People have a tendency to see what they want to see
People tend to take more credit for success than they do blame for failure
People tend to judge others who are similar to themselves on key characteristics
Ideological motives (ex: politics) can color our attributions for the behavior of others
Melven Lerner: 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”
The belief in a just world can help victims cope and serves as a buffer against stress
Political ideology can skew the belief in a just world
The more threatened we feel by an apparent injustice, the greater is the need to protect ourselves from the implication that it could happen to us, so we disparage the victim
Summation Model of Information Integration: The more positive traits there are, the better
Averaging Model of Information Integration: The higher the average value of all the various traits, the better
Impression Formation: The process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression
Information Integration Theory: Impressions formed of others are based on a combination, or integration, of...
…personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver
…a weighted average, not a simple average, of the target person’s characteristics
Perceiver Characteristics
Each of us differs in terms of the kinds of impressions we form of others
Part of the reason for differences among perceivers is that we tend to use ourselves as a standard when evaluating others
A perceiver’s current mood state can also influence the impressions formed of others
People who are induced into a happy mood are also more optimistic, more lenient, and less critical in the attributions they make for others who succeed or fail
Embodiment Effects: Once a person is seen as warm (rather than cold) we assume that this person is also trustworthy, friendly, caring, and helpful
Priming Effects
Priming: The tendency for frequently or recently used concepts to come to mind easily and influence the way we interpret new information
The effect of priming on person impressions was first demonstrated by E. Tory Higgins and others
Priming seems to work best when the prime words are presented so rapidly that people are not even aware of the exposure
Our motivations and even our social behaviors are also subject to the automatic effects of priming without awareness
Target Characteristics
Individuals can reliably be distinguished from one another along five broad traits
Some of these factors are easier to judge than others
The valence of a trait (whether it is considered good or bad) also influences its impact on our final impressions
Trait Negativity Bias: The tendency for negative information to weigh more heavily on our impressions than positive information
One bad trait may be enough to tarnish a person’s reputation
Our positive expectations of others are so strong that the absence of a favorable evaluation may lead us to assume the worst
No negative info is stated, but it’s implied by omission
It’s probably adaptive for us to stay alert for negative, potentially threatening info
Implicit Personality Theory: 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 they have other traits as well
Solomon Asch: Central traits like warm and cold imply the presence of certain other traits and exert a powerful influence on final impressions
People differentiate each other first in terms of their warmth and second in terms of their competence, and these are universal dimensions of social cognition
Geoffrey Goodwin: Distinctly moral traits proved more important than distinctly warm traits at predicting the positive and negative impressions that people form of others
Perception of morality plays a special role in the impressions we form of others
People make moral judgements about others instantly and intuitively
Primacy Effect: The tendency for info presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than info presented later
Once perceivers think they have formed an accurate impression of someone, they tend to pay less attention to subsequent info
Need for Closure: The desire to reduce ambiguity
Change-of-Meaning Hypothesis: Once people have formed an impression, they start to interpret inconsistent info in light of that impression
Confirmation Biases: Tendencies to interpret, seek, and create info in ways that verify existing beliefs
Events that are ambiguous enough to support contrasting interpretations are like inkblots: we see or hear in them what we expect to see or hear
Belief Perseverance: A tendency to retain to one’s initial beliefs even after they have been discredited
Once people form a belief, they conjure up explanations that make sense, and those explanations help to perpetuate the belief even after it has been discredited
Mark Snyder and William Swann: Expecting a certain kind of person, participants unwittingly sought evidence that would confirm their expectations
Thinking someone has a certain trait, they engage in a one-sided search for info.
In doing so, they create a reality that ultimately supports their beliefs
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations
Social Perception: The processes by which people come to understand one another
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov: Sometimes it takes a mere fraction of a second for you to form impressions of a stranger based on their face
Our first impressions are influenced in subtle ways by a person’s physical appearance
Physiognomy: The art of reading character from faces
Ran Hassin and Yaacov Trope: People prejudge others in photographs as kind-hearted or mean-spirited based on facial features
People can also read traits into faces based on prior information
Adults who have baby-faced features tend to be seen as warm, kind, submissive, etc.
Human beings are programed by evolution to respond gently to babyish features so that real babies are treated with tender care
Leslie Zebrowitz: We associate babyish features with helplessness traits and then overgeneralize this expectation to baby-faced adults
Alexander Todorov: People are quick to perceive unfamiliar faces as more or less trustworthy by focusing on facial features
Seen as trustworthy if they look happy
Seen as untrustworthy if they look angry
Scripts: Preset notions about certain types of situations
Knowledge of social settings provides an important context for understanding other people’s verbal and nonverbal behavior
Our expectations for how situations affect us can influence the way we interpret other people’s facial expressions
Identifying actions from movements is easy and allows us to recognize specific individuals strictly by their movements
We derive meaning from our observations by dividing the continuous stream of human behavior into discrete units
Darren Newtson: Some perceivers break the behavior stream into a large number of fine units, while others break it into a small number of gross units
The manner in which people divide a stream can influence their perceptions
Fine Units: Attended more closely, detected more meaningful events, remembered more details about behavior
Mind Perception: The process by which people attribute humanlike mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people
People who identify someone’s actions in high-level terms rather than low-level terms are more likely to attribute humanizing thoughts to that person
In general, the more humanlike a target object is, the more likely we are to attribute it to qualities of “mind”
Heather Gray: People perceive minds along two dimensions
Agency: A target’s ability to plan and execute behavior
Experience: The capacity to feel pleasure, pain, and other sensations
The more “mind” attributed to a character, the more people like and value it
Will people come to see a humanlike mind in machines?
Nonverbal Behavior: Behavior that reveals a person’s feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues
The face expresses emotion in ways that are both innate and understood by people all over the world
Are basic emotions are universally recognized from the face, or is the link culturally specific?
Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady
Both: We can recognize emotions from all cultures, but people in those cultures are a little more accurate (in-group advantage)
Darwin: The ability to recognize emotion in others has survival value for all members of a species - it is more important to identify some emotions than others
Christine and Ranald Hansen’s anger superiority effect
People are quicker to spot angry faces in a crowd rather than faces with neutral, non-threatening emotions
People recognize the face of disgust and experience it at a neural level
Emoticons filling the gap of nonverbal cues while texting
Eye contact
As social beings, people are highly attentive to eyes, often following the gaze of others
People who look us straight in the eye quickly draw and hold our attention, increase arousal, and activate key social areas of the brain
There is a great deal of cultural variation in nonverbal behavior and common greetings
Ekman and Friesen: Some channels of communication are relatively difficult for deceivers to control, while others are relatively easy
Observers who watched tapes that focused on the body were better than detecting deception than were those who saw tapes focused on the face
Judgements are highly prone to error
There is a mismatch between the behavioral cues that actually signal deception and those we use to detect deception
None of the behavioral cues people look for are very telling
Innocent truth tellers are also likely to exhibit signs of stress
Albert Vrij, Anders Granhag: Lying is harder to do and requires more thinking than telling the truth, so we should induce and focus on behavioral cues that betray cognitive effort
Ask ppl to recount their stories in reverse chronological order
Urge ppl to maintain eye contact
Dispositions: Stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities
Individuals differ in the extent to which they feel a need to explain the events of human behavior
Attribution Theory: A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior
Causal attributions:
Personal Attributions: Internal characteristics such as ability, personality, mood, or effort
Situational Attributions: External factors such as the task, other people, or luck
Jones and Keith Davis - Correspondent Inference Theory: Each of us tries to understand other people by observing and analyzing their behavior
Degree of choice
Expectedness of behavior / is it typical or does it depart from the norm?
Intended effects or consequences of someone’s behavior
Harold Kelley - Covariation Theory: People attribute behavior to factors that are present when a behavior occurs and are absent when it does not
Consensus Information: How different persons react to the same stimulus
Distinctiveness Information: How the same person reacts to different stimuli
Consistency Information: What happens to the behavior at another time when the person and the stimulus both remain the same
Daniel Kahneman: The human mind operates by two different systems of thought
System 1: Quick, easy, and automatic
System 2: Slow, controlled, and effortful
Both systems are active when people are awake
System 2 takes over when something takes effort, System 1 guides us
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
Gives rise to the false-consensus effect (a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors)
Social perceptions are influenced more by one vivid life story than by hard statistical facts
Base-Rate Fallacy: People are relatively insensitive to numerical base rates, or probabilities and are influenced more by graphic, dramatic events
Can lead to various misperceptions of risk
Counterfactual Thinking: A tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might’ve occurred but did not
Kahneman and Miller
If we imagine a result that is better than the actual result, we’re likely to experience disappointment, regret, and frustration
If the imagined result is worse, then we react with emotions that range from relief and satisfaction to elation
Some individuals think in counterfactual terms more than others
People who strongly believe in free will are more likely than those who believe their fate is predetermined/unpredictable
Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior
First, we identify the behavior and make a quick personal attribution, then we correct or adjust that inference to account for situational influences
First step is simple and automatic
Second step requires attention, thought, and effort
American participants made more personal attributions, Indians made more situational attributions
People in the upper social classes are more likely than those in the lower classes to see behavior in general as caused by internal personal traits
Western cultures emphasize the individual person and their attributes
East Asian cultures focus on the background or field that surrounds that person
It is possible for us to hold differing cultural worldviews at the same time and to perceive others through either lens, depending on which culture is brought to mind
Our social perceptions are sometimes colored by personal hopes, needs, wishes, and preferences
People have a tendency to see what they want to see
People tend to take more credit for success than they do blame for failure
People tend to judge others who are similar to themselves on key characteristics
Ideological motives (ex: politics) can color our attributions for the behavior of others
Melven Lerner: 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”
The belief in a just world can help victims cope and serves as a buffer against stress
Political ideology can skew the belief in a just world
The more threatened we feel by an apparent injustice, the greater is the need to protect ourselves from the implication that it could happen to us, so we disparage the victim
Summation Model of Information Integration: The more positive traits there are, the better
Averaging Model of Information Integration: The higher the average value of all the various traits, the better
Impression Formation: The process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression
Information Integration Theory: Impressions formed of others are based on a combination, or integration, of...
…personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver
…a weighted average, not a simple average, of the target person’s characteristics
Perceiver Characteristics
Each of us differs in terms of the kinds of impressions we form of others
Part of the reason for differences among perceivers is that we tend to use ourselves as a standard when evaluating others
A perceiver’s current mood state can also influence the impressions formed of others
People who are induced into a happy mood are also more optimistic, more lenient, and less critical in the attributions they make for others who succeed or fail
Embodiment Effects: Once a person is seen as warm (rather than cold) we assume that this person is also trustworthy, friendly, caring, and helpful
Priming Effects
Priming: The tendency for frequently or recently used concepts to come to mind easily and influence the way we interpret new information
The effect of priming on person impressions was first demonstrated by E. Tory Higgins and others
Priming seems to work best when the prime words are presented so rapidly that people are not even aware of the exposure
Our motivations and even our social behaviors are also subject to the automatic effects of priming without awareness
Target Characteristics
Individuals can reliably be distinguished from one another along five broad traits
Some of these factors are easier to judge than others
The valence of a trait (whether it is considered good or bad) also influences its impact on our final impressions
Trait Negativity Bias: The tendency for negative information to weigh more heavily on our impressions than positive information
One bad trait may be enough to tarnish a person’s reputation
Our positive expectations of others are so strong that the absence of a favorable evaluation may lead us to assume the worst
No negative info is stated, but it’s implied by omission
It’s probably adaptive for us to stay alert for negative, potentially threatening info
Implicit Personality Theory: 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 they have other traits as well
Solomon Asch: Central traits like warm and cold imply the presence of certain other traits and exert a powerful influence on final impressions
People differentiate each other first in terms of their warmth and second in terms of their competence, and these are universal dimensions of social cognition
Geoffrey Goodwin: Distinctly moral traits proved more important than distinctly warm traits at predicting the positive and negative impressions that people form of others
Perception of morality plays a special role in the impressions we form of others
People make moral judgements about others instantly and intuitively
Primacy Effect: The tendency for info presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than info presented later
Once perceivers think they have formed an accurate impression of someone, they tend to pay less attention to subsequent info
Need for Closure: The desire to reduce ambiguity
Change-of-Meaning Hypothesis: Once people have formed an impression, they start to interpret inconsistent info in light of that impression
Confirmation Biases: Tendencies to interpret, seek, and create info in ways that verify existing beliefs
Events that are ambiguous enough to support contrasting interpretations are like inkblots: we see or hear in them what we expect to see or hear
Belief Perseverance: A tendency to retain to one’s initial beliefs even after they have been discredited
Once people form a belief, they conjure up explanations that make sense, and those explanations help to perpetuate the belief even after it has been discredited
Mark Snyder and William Swann: Expecting a certain kind of person, participants unwittingly sought evidence that would confirm their expectations
Thinking someone has a certain trait, they engage in a one-sided search for info.
In doing so, they create a reality that ultimately supports their beliefs
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations