Chapter 4

1. Chapter 4 Perceiving Persons

2. Social Perception • The process by which people come to understand one another. • We’ll look at: • The “raw data” of social perception • How we explain and analyze behavior • How we integrate our observations into coherent impressions of other persons • How our impressions can subtly create a distorted picture of reality • We’re both perceiver and target

3. Observation: The Elements of Social Perception—Persons • First impressions are often subtly influenced by different aspects of a person’s appearance. • We prejudge people based on facial features. • We read traits from faces, as well as read traits into faces, based on prior information. • We judge “baby-faced” adults differently than “mature-faced” adults. • Why? Explain the explanation.

4. Silent Language of Nonverbal Behavior • Behavioral cues are used to identify a person’s inner states, as well as his or her actions. • What kinds of nonverbal cues do people use? • Facial expressions of emotion and ….

5. Distinguishing Truth from Deception • Freud: “No mortal can keep a secret… betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” • Channels of communication differ in terms of ease of control. • Face is relatively easier for deceivers to control. • Nervous movements of our body are somewhat harder to control.

6. Why Do We Have Difficulty Detecting Deception? • Mismatch between the behavioral cues that actually signal deception and the ones used to detect deception. • Four channels of communication provide relevant information: • Words: Cannot be trusted • Face: Controllable • Body: Somewhat more revealing than face • Voice: Most revealing cue • Perceivers tune in to the wrong channels

7. Attribution Theories • Dispositions: stable characteristics, such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities • Attribution theories describe how people explain the causes of behavior • Heider: Explanations can be grouped into two categories: • Personal Attributions (Internal disposition) • Situational Attributions (External)

8. Attributional Biases • Do we really analyze behavior in a rational, logical manner? • Do we really have the time, motivation, or cognitive capacity for such elaborate and mindful processes? • The answer? • Sometimes yes…Sometimes no.

9. Cognitive Heuristics • Cognitive heuristics are information-processing rules of thumb. • Enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy • Problem is that using cognitive heuristics can frequently lead to error.

10. Availability Heuristic • The tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind. • Problems with relying on the availability heuristic: • False-consensus effect

11. Fundamental Attribution Error • When we explain other people’s behavior we tend to: • Overestimate the role of personal factors, and • Overlook the impact of situations

12. The 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. • Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom” study