Social Perception

Social Perception: how we form impression of other people and make inferences about them – non-verbal communication: important source of info

Non-verbal Behaviour

Nonverbal communication: how we communicate with others intentional or non-intentional
Non-verbal cues: many happening at once – mainly facial expressions – tone of voice, gestures, body position/movement (like you may try to be closer to you or touch by grazing hand)
Used to express emotions, attitude, personality – facial expression → emotions – attitude is evaluation of someone – extroverts may be more expressive with expressions and gestures
Tend to mimic others intentional or nonintentional – when someone is sad automatically tend to soften faces – women more likely to mimic others – depends on whether we like them – capacity for empathy (mirror neurons) respond when we perform action – when someone is crying neurons activate as if your crying but your not
Can use as sub for verbal communication – try to form impression of what is happening

Encoding vs Decoding

Encode: to express or emit nonverbal communication
Decode: interpret the meaning of nonverbal communication – important part of social perception – way it perceived may be diff based on person’s own preconceived
Darwin: primary emotions can be conveyed through the face – all humans can encode emotional expressions and decode info (interpret info)
6 Universal Facial Expressions:

Universal bc all humans can express these emotions since birth – basic emotions that can be the base for more complex emotions
More debated universal emotions (22) – contempt, pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, anxiety – more complex can't express since birth
Might not correctly identify emotions – can be difficult to differentiate negative emotions – can be instances when we are not interpreting emotions correctly
Context – when we don’t have context may not be able to know what is happening

Interpreting Facial Expressions

West → analytical – east → holistic – people in US tended to base emotion more likely to attribute it to the entire picture – Japanese participants looked around a lot more
Affect Blends: one part of your face is expressing one emotion where another part of your face is expressing another – ex. Friend who moves to other country for dream job – happy they are getting dream job but sad they are moving
Display Rules: culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviours are appropriate to display – ex. People from eastern countries tend to show emotions less and not like it when negative emotions are shown altogether – common display rule is men can show anger and women can’t – or looking at people in the eyes when talking is different around the world
Emotional expression encouraged in individualistic cultures – strong negative emotions discouraged in collectivist cultures
Other cultural influences – eye contact – personal space (western cultures tend to keep arms length), hand gestures (okay sign)
Emblems: nonverbal gestures with well-understood definitions – vary depending on culture (such as a thumbs up) means good thing or okay here but can have specific derogatory meaning in other cultures

Children form impressions as well – and they stick around
Form in 1/10 in a second – they stick around even when you know them for a while
Schemas: mental maps they go back to when making sense of social world – first impressions influenced by schemas about personality qualities believed to accompany certain features – people perceive attractive people as good – media can influence our schemas

Implicit Personality Theory: We make sense of people based on info we have on them – type of schema – way we form impression on someone based on little pieces of info you have of them
we tend to stick with the original piece of info we have – people tend to view extroverted people as more confident
Implicit Personality Theory + Culture: schemas on people based on culture we grew up in – ex. “Shi gu type” – family oriented, socially reserved, etc., vs “artistic” type

Sometimes try to make sense of other people’s behaviour – takes away ambiguity from social situation
Fundamental attribution error – blame people for behaviors and don’t pay attention to social situation around them – even when we do have accurate info on a situation we still may not pay attention to it – 2 step process

Make internal attribution (people in west more likely to stay on 1st step)
If we have time, effort, knowledge – may be more likely to think of everything (people in east asian culture will take a look at the whole)

Actor/Observer Diff: tendency to see other’s behaviours caused by them (internal) whereas seeing own behaviour due to situational/external factors
Protect self-esteem – internal attributions (should have studied more) or external (prof made hard exam) → self-serving attribution: overestimate their own contribution to shared task – viewing themselves in more positive light than realistically – collectivist cultures – view achievements more external vs downfalls more internal – west people may blame others for own failures
Defensive Attributions: to deal with threats to self esteem or dealing with vulnerability – think everything bad can happen to everyone else but not to us be we are inherently better – belief in just world: basically karma – can make us feel good bc if act good then feel but also victim blaming when done something bad – religion

Internal Attribution: inference abt person’s behaviour is due to something abt them
External Attribution: inference that person’s behaviour is bc of something abt the situations they are in
Attribution can impact how we view someone and how we decide to behave with them – self-fulfilling prophecy
don't need to know Kelly’s Covariation Model