WEEK 3- Social Perception

Topics:

  • Non-verbal Communication

  • Attribution 

  • Impression Formation 

  • Impression Management


What is Social Perception?

  • Go on a coffee date

  • While on the date, your brain is processing a great deal of information –such as?

  • This processing is known as social perception


Nonverbal Communication

  • we often can’t just ask someone how they are feeling – why not?

  • So we use non-verbal communication

    • communication between individuals that relies on an unspoken language of facial expressions, eye contact, and body language


Channels of Non-Verbal Communication

Basic channels include: 

  • Facial expressions 

    • reveal current moods/feelings

  • Eye contact 

    • indicates positive feelings (except staring)

  • Body language 

    • gestures, posture, movements

    • reveals emotional states, cultural emblems

  • Touching 

    • suggests affection, sexual interest, dominance, caring, aggression


  1. Facial Expressions

  • Six basic emotions?

    • Anger fear surprise disgust happiness and sadness

    • Seventh has been added is contempt

  • Do humans only show these emotions?

    • No we can show blended emotions

  • Are emotions an accurate guide?

    • Not necessarily

    • If situational cues match up

  • Culture and recognition of emotional expressions?

    • Emoticons:

      • Canada and the U.S.: :) and :(

        • Western tends to look toward the mouth

      • Japan and China: ^_^ and ;_;

        • Eastern cultures ten to focus on the eyes

  1. Eye Contact

  • We often learn much about others’ feelings from their eyes

  • High level of eye contact?


  1. Body Language

  • Large numbers of bodily movements = emotional arousal

  • Movements involving whole body can also be informative (e.g., threatening posture)

  • More specific information about others’ feelings provided by gestures

    • Eg. emblems

      • Body movements or gestures that signify meaning depending on the culture

        • Eg. thumbs up, finger crossed


  1. Touching

  • If another person touches you during a conversation, how would you react? It depends on several factors:

    • Who does the touching?

    • Nature of the contact

    • Context in which the touching takes place

    • Do handshakes reveal much about others?



Recognizing Deception: The Role of Non-Verbal Cues

  • Why do people lie?

  • Lying is an all-too-common part of social life.

  • This raises two important questions:


  1. How good are we at recognizing deception by others?

  2. How can we do a better job at this task?


  • Answer to first Q – somewhat discouraging – we only do a little better than chance

  • Amy Leach – UOIT– 350 undergraduates detecting deception in both children and adults – accuracy only around chance levels

  • What about those whose professions depend on lie detection?

    • Secret service agents have 67%

    • Most professions are still no better than chace

  • Why do we have such trouble?

    • We have a tendency to believe people are truthful, can’t  always read all signs

  • So how do we do a better job?

    • Vrij – pay attention to both verbal AND nonverbal cues



Improving Lie Detection

  • Nonverbal cues to deception fall into 2 categories: visual cues and vocal cues

    • Visual: eye contact smiling

    • Vocal: stuttering, pitch

  • Are eye contact and fidgeting good indicators of lie-telling?

    • Depends on the person but overall is not a reliable indicator of telling a lie

    • Research shows there are very few nonverbal behaviours that are good indicators

  • One cue that is a good indicator – how much person moves

    • Decreased movement actually shows deception bc they are trying to avoid stereotypical behaviours of lying

    • Especially in hands and fingers

  • Various vocal cues are good too – example?

    • Taking long to respond, fail to use the words “i” or “me” (trying to divert attention from themselves


Can people be trained to be effective lie detectors?

  • Stephen Porter and Mike Woodworth of Dalhousie University and Angela Birt of UBC

    • yes, lie- detection training CAN be effective Canadian parole officers’ ability to detect lies improved with training from 40% to 77%


Gender Differences

  • ​​Women are better at sending and receiving non verbal cues

  • Men are better at detecting deception overall

  • Are women better at nonverbal communication because of stereotypes?

    • Yes, women are supposed to be supportive and sensitive to the people around them

      • Might pay attention to the reactions of other people because of stereotypes (self-fulfilling)

    • Men are supposed to be dominant and assertive


Attribution

When we are trying to understand the people around us. “This person is lying because they are acting like _____ and ______”

Efforts to understand the causes behind someone else’s bahaviour (or even our own)

  • How often do you analyze someone’s actions?

  • When was the last time you analyzed a hug that your partner/family member gave you? A snippy remark?

    • If someone you care about gives you a hug, its normal, but if they give you a snippy remark, you will dwell on it a bit more and try to make sense of it

  • Heider (1958): We either make internal (personal/dispositional) attributions or external (situational) attributions

  • Internal would be something about them, their personality

  • External is because someone made them do it, they were forced to

    • Eg. Negative Behaviour: a man is rude to his colleague

      • Dispositional attribution: the man is a horrible person

        • Unfavourable reaction: I don’t like this man

      • Situational attribution: the man was unfairly evaluated

        • Sympathetic reaction: I can understand



Attribution Theories

Attempts to explain how people make these attributions

  • Many different attribution theories

  • What is attribution theory?

  • Heider (1958) “father” of attribution theory

    • Concluded that people tend to attribute someone’s behaviour to internal causes or external causes 

      • People tend to do one or the other

    • Distinction between internal and external causes often blurs – why?

      • External situations/environments can lead to internal changes

    • Often attribute behaviour to one OR other, not both



Inferring Traits

  • Jones and Davis (1965) CORRESPONDENT INFERENCE THEORY

  • Correspond and infer. We often infer/assume that other people's intentions dispositions correspond to their actions

  • Each of us tries to understand others by observing and analyzing behaviour

    • Make inferences based on three factors:


  1. degree of choice

  • Did the person have freedom of choice?

  1. expectedness of behaviour

  • Was the behaviour something you would expect from this person?

  1. intended effects or consequences of someone’s behaviour

  • Were they harmful? Was it desired by either party?


  • At first glance, this might seem simple…

    • A lot of the time our situations dictate our actions


Common Sense Attributions

  • Attributions are often rational


Kelley’s Covariation Theory (1972) 

We use information about consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness to explain behaviour


Consensus:

 extent others behave in same way toward the stimulus

  • Eg. driving and someone cuts you off. If other people are also always cutting you off, consensus is high


Consistency: 

extent person always behaves this way toward the stimulus

  • Eg. you and driver live close to each other and this particular driver always cut you off


***Distinctiveness: 

extent person responds in the same way toward different stimuli

  • Eg. does the other driver also cut everyone else off, distinctiveness is LOW (it's not unique) compared to if they only cut you off, distinctiveness is HIGH (it is unique)


  • People attribute the causes of others’ behavior to internal factors when consensus and distinctiveness are LOW, but consistency is HIGH

    • No other driver cuts you off

    • They do it often

    • Cuts off everyone

    • Therefore, driver sucks

  • People attribute the causes of others’ behavior to external factors when consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness are all HIGH

  • People attribute the causes of others’ behavior to a combination of internal and external factors when consensus is LOW, but consistency and distinctiveness are HIGH



Lee Ross (1977)- Fundamental Attribution Error

  • Jones and Harris (1967) student participants – pro/anti Castro essays/speeches

  • If we attribute others’ behaviour to dispositional factors, what do we attribute our own to? 

    • We tend to think we act to dispositional


Fundamental Attribution Error in everyday life


Examples

  • Napolitan and Goethals (1979)

    • students greeted by grad student – either friendly or not – ½ participants told that she was told to be that way; other half not told

    • Being told that she was instructed to act that way had NO effect – rated as the way she acted anyway

  • Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz (1977)

    • “Alex Trebek types”– is he overly intelligent? next slide


The Role of Perceptual Salience

  • Why do we commit the FAE?

  • Situational causes of another’s behaviour are virtually invisible to us

  • What is perceptual salience? 

    • The information that is the focus of our attention

  • People tend to overestimate the causal role of perceptually salient information


​​Taylor and Fiske (1975) study:

  • Six participants watched two confederates (people who are in on the experiment) have a conversation

  • Researchers manipulated perceptual salience by either

    • Making one speaker visible, one not

    • Making both speakers visible

  • Taylor and Fiske (1975) found:

    • The person participants could see best was the one judged to have the most active role in the conversation

    • If participants could see both, they rated both as equally influential on the conversation


The Role of Culture in the FAE

  • Western culture emphasizes the individual and socializes us to prefer persona/internal attributions

  • Eastern cultures emphasize interdependence and socializes people to prefer situational/external attributions


Morris and Peng (1994)

  • Study of articles in Chinese and English language newspapers

  • Two similar mass murders

    • Chinese graduate student in Iowa

    • Caucasian postal worker in Michigan

  • What were the results?


Is the FAE really an error?

  • Idea that we are prone to the FAE has been criticized – is it always an error?

    • Not always

  • Also –overstatement to say that all observers in all cases underestimate situational causes

    • Depends on the person, depends on our mood, depends on how obvious situational causes are

  • What has happened as a result? 

  • Turn to Jones and Davis’ correspondent inferences theory many people refer to the FAE as the correspondence bias now



How fundamental is the FAE?

  • Experiments reveal that bias occurs even when we are aware of situational forces

  • FAE is often adaptive why? 

    • Traits often pick our situations as well

  • Attribution error is FUNDAMENTAL because it colours our explanation in basic and important ways


The Actor/Observer Difference

Tendency to attribute our own behaviour to situational causes. Other people’s behaviour to distributional causes

  • Actor-Observer Effect (Jones & Nisbett, 1971)

  • So, it is similar to the FAE, but our use of the FAE applies more to behaviour of others than to our own behaviour

  • Why do people show this effect?

    • Perceptual salience

    • Information availability


Self-serving attributions

  • Sometimes biased processing has a motivational basis 

  • As a result, we use attributions that protect our self- esteem and our belief in a just world (Lerner, 1980)

    • Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people

    • Things happen how their meant to be

  • We take credit for successes (internal attribution); blame others/situations for failures (external attribution)

  • Self-serving attributions lead people to:

    • Believe their actions are rational and defensible

    • Believe that the actions of others are unreasonable and unjustified

    • Remember their own contributions to group work better than contributions of others



Impression Formation

The process through which we form impressions of other people

  • Obviously attributions take mental work – do 1st impressions?

  • Asch’s work on central and peripheral traits

  • People used to believe that we just ‘add’ traits together to form an impression – Asch didn’t believe this


Asch: Central and Peripheral Traits

  • Imagine hearing these descriptions: intelligent—skillful—industrious— warm—determined—practical— cautious intelligent—skillful—industrious— cold—determined—practical—cautious

    • Asch - “warm” and “cold” are central traits

  • “polite” and “blunt” peripheral traits, not as significant

  • Warm and cold are central traits



Implicit Personality Theories

  • We all form implicit personality theories

  • Can be viewed as a specific type of schema 

  • So if your friend describes someone you are about to meet as “helpful” and “kind”, will you assume that they are also “sincere”?

  • Research has also shown that implicit personality theories are strongly shaped by culture



Cognitive Perspective on Impression Formation

  • Social psychologists have found it useful to examine cognitive processes when it comes to impression formation

  • How do we form impressions?

    • Do we add pieces of information together or do we average them?

  • Strangers possessing two highly favourable traits rated better than strangers possessing two highly favourable traits and two moderately favourable traits


Motivation and Impression Formation

  • Usually, we form impressions in the simplest way possible:

  1.  by placing people into large social categories with which we are already familiar

  2. Then base our impressions, at least in part, on what we know about these social groups 


  • If we are motivated to be more accurate, though, we may focus on people we meet more as individuals possessing a unique collection of traits 

  • So motivation is important


Impression Management

  • Tactics (potential pitfalls)

    • Self-enhancement

    • Other-enhancement

  • Example - Slime effect:

    • A tendency to form negative impressions of others who play up to their superiors but who treat subordinates with disdain

    • We are constantly self-monitoring