Quiz 5: Social beliefs and judgments

First Impressions Matter

Thin slices of information

• People often decide very quickly what other are like baked on minimal information

• Accuracy of judgments tend to be similar or more accurate than judgments based on extensive information

  • Romantic potential (speed dating)

  • Sexual preference

  • Personality characteristics

What information do we use?

Physical cues

• Appearance and behavior are key determinants of our first impressions

  • Clothing

  • Physique

  • Facial expressions

  • Body language

  • Physical attractiveness

  • Etc

Accuracy of Judgments

• Our judgments are both accurate and inaccurate

• We tend to be accurate about external visible attributes

• We are relatively less accurate about infrared internal states(traits or feelings)

Accuracy of Judgments

• Why are people’s personalities difficult to judge accurately

  • Lack of objective criteria

    • Subjective, often biased perspective

  • Idiosyncratic criteria

    • Agree more about likeability than traits

  • Limited predictive validity

    • Traits not always good predictors of behavior

Accuracy of Judgments

• People agree more about observable vs less observable traits

• Agree more with a person’s self-perception if person is well know

• More accurate judgments if target’s behavior is not overly variable

• More accurate judgments if we are held responsible for the outcome

Attractiveness

• Efran & Patterson(1976)

  • Examined Canadian federal election: attractive candidates received 2.5 times the votes of unattractive candidates

• Reing & Kernama (1993)

  • Attractive fund raisers for the AHA had 42% compliance , unattractive =23% 

Attractiveness

• Hamermesh & Biddle (1994)

  • Attractive individuals receive 12-14% higher salaries than unattractive people

• Stewart (1980)

  • Attractive people are two times more likely to avoid incarceration for the same crime as unattractive people

What information do we use

Salience

• People tend to pay attention to the figure rather than to the ground or setting

• Figure-ground distinction refers to the perceptual tendency to simplify a scene into the main object we are looking at (figure) and everything else that forms the background (ground)

  • Most alien cues are used/weighted most heavily

  • E.g., Brightness, loudness, motion, novelty

What information do we use 

Effects of salience:

• Draws/shifts attention to target

• Influences perceptions of causality

• Produces more extreme judgments

• Enhances consistency of judgments

From Observation to Inference

• Focus quickly shifts from observing information to making inferences / attributions about personality traits

  • Inferences often made without careful thought

  • Reliance on heuristics(eg stereotypes)

  • Cognitive efficiency

  • Implicit personality theories used to infer traits from other traits

Lay Theories of Personality

Implicit Personality Theories

• A network of assumptions people make about relationships among traits and behaviors

• knowing someone has a particular trait leads us to believe that he/she also Has other specific and related traits

• One trait implies the presence of another (Halo effect)

Halo Effect: What is beautiful is good (Dion, Berscheid & Walster, 1972)

The halo effect (Thorndike, 1920)

• A cognitive bias whereby a salient feature of a particular person, item or phenomenon colours our perception of it as a whole

  • Student has good handwriting, thus likely writes high quality essays

  • Pleasant ambience in a restaurant, thus food likely tastes good

  • Attractive person, thus is likely intelligent, honest, kind

Traits Can Bias Perceptions

Negativity Bias

• Negative traits tend to affect impressions more than positive traits(especially negative moral trait)

Positivity bias

• Overall, we tend to evaluate others positively until given a reason to think otherwise

Traits and Person Perception

Which traits are most impactful on our evaluations of

• We tend to evaluate others along two primary dimensions

  • Competence & Interpersonal qualities

Central traits:(Kelly, 1950)

• Traits that exert a powerful influence on overall impressions

  • Warm/cold (vs. polite/blunt, which don’t)

The Centrality of Morality

• Morality: More than just a third facet of social perception

• Perceptions of morality strongly influence our evaluations of others

• Often made rapidly, without careful deliberation or intention

• Stronger influence on impressions than stereotypical “warm” traits

• Broad consensus on traits that comprise “moral” character (e.g., honesty, trustworthiness, fairness, compassion, self-control, etc., Helzer, et al. 2014)

Goals and Trait Preferences

How does context impact the importance of traits?

• People’s goals play an important role in weighting importance

  • Romantic partner vs. casual date

  • Friendship vs. functional (e.g., gym partner)

  • Career advancement, etc.

• Self-evaluation of social value(i.e., social currency)

  • Likelihood of goal achievement influenced by perceived social value

Categorical Information

Categorization

• We automatically perceive stimuli as part of a group or category

Consequences of Categorization

• Can be positive/negative

• leads to category-based social judgments (stereotyping)

• Speeds processing time

• Can lead to errors

Categorical Impressions

The Continuum Model of Impression Formation

<-category-based impressions(peripheral processing)------>ididuated impression*systemic processing)->

• General tendency is to make category-based inferences (cognitive efficiency)

• Often rely on heuristic and stereotypes 

Individuated Impressions

Dual Processing

• Individuated impressions typically used when...

• High motivation to be accurate (e.g., social consequences for inaccuracy)

• Target not easily categorized/doesn’t fit category

• Requires more cognitive effort than category-based impressions

Context Effects

Assimilation

• Biases judgments in the same direction as the context(viewed as similar)

• More common when using category-based processing

Contrast

• Biases judgments away from the context(viewed as different)

• More common when using individuated information 

Additional Factors

• Factors influencing our reactions to others…

• Other’s similarity to the self

• Prior experience

• Prior expectations

• Beliefs about stability/malleability of traits

• Current emotional state/mood

Constructing Perceptions of Others

Information Integration Theory (Anderson, 1981)

• Are impressions of others formed by adding or averaging traits

• Highly Positive Traits-summation model

• Moderately Positive Traits-averaging model

Impression of others formed by averaging traits (information integration theory: Anderson, 9181)

• Evasion based on average of multiple traits, weighted by importance

• i.e., certain traits hold more importance thus more influential than others

• Relative importance of traits differs between individuals

• Perceiver characteristics influence evaluations (eg.g mood, self monitoring)

Integrating Impressions

Resolving Inconsistencies

• Information inconsistent with other impressions may be remembered especially well

  • Being “cognitively busy” prevents us from thinking about inconsistent information so it tends to be forgotten easier

  • We may differentiate incongruent information by context

  • Sometimes we just recognize incongruities without integrating them

Organizing our social world

Schemas: Mental structures used to organize knowledge about an object and relationships among its attributes

• Reduce the amount of information we need to process about an object

• Reduce ambiguity regarding features or properties of an object

• Guide attention and encoding of an object: (e.g., what is noticed, how quickly, our interpretation, and recall of an object)

Protopic:

• A typical (or the best) example of a category

• A mountain gorilla is the prototype of all gorilla

Exemplars:

• A specific example of an item from a category

• Could be a mountain gorilla, silverback gorilla, etc.

Priming

• Priming is the process by which our recent experiences increase the cognitive accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept

• Can affect thoughts, feelings, and behavior

Perceptions can be Biased via Priming

Negativity bias

• Of participants who read the negative words, 10% rated Thomas positively(Higgins et al. 1977)

• Positivity bias

• Of participants who read the positive words 70% rated Thomas positively

Motivated Social Perceivers

We seek to understand the causes of our own behavior

We seek to gain insight into the causes of the behaviour of others

Uncovering the Stable Causes of Behavior

• Often we wish to know more than the temporary causes of a person's behavior due to enduring characteristics of the person that might allow us to predict behavior in the future?

• Two prominent theories describe how we engage in this attribution process

Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones & Davis, 1965)

• We rely on observable behaviors to make inferences about the corresponding underlying traits that produced them

  • If someone did a ‘kind’ behavior we may label them as a ‘kind’ person

  • If someone behaved with little thought to the consequences, we may label them as an impulsive person

Motivated Inferences

Understanding our social world

• We are motivated to view others’ behavior as intentional and predictable, as reflecting their underlying personality traits

• Information required to make accurate inferences can often be ambiguous

• Situational/contextual cues often provide valuable information

Motivated Inferences

Which factors do people use to determine whether a behaviour is motivated by internal vs. external factors?

Internal attributions are more likely if others’ behavior was…

1) freely chosen 2)unusual/socially undesirable 3)lacks clear reward or punishment

The Covariation Model

The Covariation Model argues that a basic distinction we need to make is between internal and external causes (Kelly, 1967)

Example: John smiles at Sarah on a Tuesday. Why did John smile? Is it…

 1)something about john 2)something about sarah 3)Something about Tuesday

Kelly Covariation Model 

1)We make attributions using information about covariation

Coverartion: 

varying together; a cause must be present when an event occurs, and absent when it doesn’t occur

2)In Kelly’s model, we use three types of information: 

consistency, consensus, distinctness

Motivated Inferences

We systematically analyze people and environment related information, and different combinations of information lead to different causal attributions

In attributing causality for behaviour like:John laughed at the comedian we might consider the following:

1. If John always laughs at this comedian, then his behaviour is highly consistent

2. If very few others laughed at the comedian, then his behaviour has low consensus.

3. If John is easily amused by comedians, then his behaviour has Low distinctiveness

Convaration

• Consistency- high(the person often behaves like this) or low (person very seldom behaves like this)

• Consensus- high(most people behave like this) or low (few people have like this)

• Distivness-height (the person doesn't behave like this in other situations) or low (the person does behave like this in other citations)

• Scoring High in the three categories shows an external attribution

• Scoring low in consensus and uniqueness while scoring high in consistency shows an internal attribution

• Different combinations can result in either internal and/or external attribution