Chapter 2

1. Chapter 2 Person Perception: Forming Impressions of Others

2. Six General Principles • minimal information • salience • context • categorization • enduring cognitive structures • needs and goals

3. What Information Do We Use? • People often decide very quickly what others are like based on minimal information.

4. What Information Do We Use? • Roles • People tend to think of others within a role context first and only then according to personality traits

5. What Information Do We Use? • Physical Cues • Appearance and behavior are key determinants of our first impressions

6. What Information Do We Use? • Salience • People pay attention to the figure rather than to the ground or setting • The most salient cues are used most heavily • Brightness, noisiness, motion, and novelty

7. What Information Do We Use? • Effects of Salience • Draws attention • Influences perceptions of causality • Produces evaluatively extreme judgments • Produce more consistency of judgment

8. What Information Do We Use? • We move very quickly from observable information (appearance & behavior) to personality trait inferences • Traits are more economical to remember • Trait inferences occur automatically • We use implicit personality theories to infer traits from other traits

9. What Information Do We Use? • Which Traits? • We tend to evaluate others along two dimensions: • Competence • Interpersonal qualities

10. What Information Do We Use? • Central Traits • Some traits may be more central than others, that is, highly associated with many other characteristics • “Warm-Cold” appears to be such a trait (Kelley, 1950)

11. What Information Do We Use? • Categorization • We automatically perceive stimuli as part of a group or category

12. What Information Do We Use? • Consequences of Categorization • leads to category-based social judgments (stereotyping) • speeds processing time • can lead to errors

13. What Information Do We Use? • The Continuum Model of Impression Formation • Impressions range from stereotypic, category-based impressions to individuated impressions (dual processing)

14. What Information Do We Use? • Dual Processing • We generally tend to use category-based inference because it is easy and quick • We use individuated information when • we are motivated to be accurate • the person doesn’t fit our categories • we have other reasons for wanting to know the person better

15. What Information Do We Use? • Context Effects • Contrast biases judgments away from the context (sees them as different) • Assimilation biases judgments in the same direction as the context (sees them as similar)

16. What Information Do We Use? • Context Effects • Assimilation occurs more when people are using category-based processing • Contrast occurs more when people are using individuated information

17. Integrating Impressions • We move quickly from observations of appearance and behavior to inferences about personality

18. Integrating Impressions • Negativity Effect • Negative traits tend to affect impressions more than positive ones (especially negative moral traits) • Positivity Bias • Overall we tend to evaluate others positively

19. Integrating Impressions • We infer what others are like from what emotions they express

20. Integrating Impressions • The Averaging Principle • averaging is used to combine separate pieces of information about people, some of which are positive and others of which are negative • A weighted averaging model, in which traits are weighted by importance, provides the best predictions

21. Integrating Impressions • Our perceptions of others’ personal qualities undergoes a shift of meaning depending on context

22. Integrating Impressions • People tend to form evaluatively consistent impressions of others (halo effect)

23. Integrating Impressions • Resolving Inconsistencies • Information that is inconsistent with other impressions may be remembered especially well • However, being “cognitively busy” prevents us from thinking about inconsistent information so we forget it • We may differentiate incongruent information by context • Sometimes we just recognize incongruities without integrating them

24. Integrating Impressions • Schemas are organized, structured sets of cognitions including knowledge about the object, relationships among its attributes, and specific examples

25. Integrating Impressions • Schemas • Person schemas • Role schemas • Group schemas (stereotypes)

26. Integrating Impressions • Schemas • Prototypes are the abstract ideal of a schema • Exemplars are particular instances of a category

27. Integrating Impressions • Schemas • When we have little information about another, we use prototypes to make inferences about them • When we have a little more information, we use both exemplars and prototypes • When we have a great deal of information, we use more well-developed schemas as well as exemplars

28. Motivated Person Perception • Our goals and feelings about other people influence the information we gather about them

29. Motivated Person Perception • Need for accuracy about another leads to more systematic processing • We remember more about another when we expect to interact with him or her

30. Motivated Person Perception • Communicating information about another leads to more evaluatively consistent impressions

31. Motivated Person Perception • When we are preoccupied we are more likely to make trait inferences

32. Motivated Person Perception • Factors influencing our reactions to others • Other’s similarity to self • Our prior experiences • Our prior expectations • Our beliefs about traits as stable or malleable • Our own emotional state or mood

33. Attribution Theory • Attribution theory is the area of psychology concerned with when and how people ask “why” questions. • Heider (1958) argued that we have needs to understand and to control the environment. These needs lead us to make attributions. • We are especially likely to make attributions when events are negative or unexpected.

34. Attribution Theory • dispositional or internal attributions • Refer to traits, attitudes, enduring internal states versus • situational or external attributions • Refer to aspects of the external environment, including other people

35. Attribution Theory • Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones and Davis [1965]) • Assumes that we seek to make “correspondent inferences” • The behavior (e.g., rude) corresponds to an underlying characteristic of the person (rude) • We use information about the social context to see if we can make a correspondent inference

36. Attribution Theory • We tend to make a correspondent inference when • A behavior is not socially desirable • A behavior is freely chosen • A behavior has a “noncommon effect” • A behavior is not part of a social role

37. Attribution Theory • Noncommon Effects • A student is choosing between 3 colleges • You attribute their motive as the distinctive effect for that choice

38. Attribution Theory • The Covariation Model (Kelley, 1967) says that people try to see if a particular cause and a particular effect go together across situations.

39. Attribution Theory • Consistency • Is the person’s response consistent over time? • Consensus • Do other people have similar responses? • Distinctiveness • Does the person respond similarly to other similar stimuli?

40. Attribution Theory Why did Mary laugh at the comedian?

41. Attribution Theory • The discounting principle suggests that we are less likely to attribute an effect to a particular cause if more than one cause is likely. • E.g., if a salesperson is nice to us, we don’t necessarily assume he or she is intrinsically friendly

42. Attribution Theory • By and large, research findings show that people’s inferences do follow the patterns described by the covariation and discounting principles

43. Attribution Theory • Biases in the Attribution Process • Considerable research suggests that there are several prominent biases in the ways we make causal attributions

44. Attribution Theory • Fundamental Attribution Error • We are more likely to attribute others’ behavior to their dispositions than to the situation they are in

45. Attribution Theory • The fundamental attribution error may occur because people make dispositional attributions automatically, and then only later use situational information to discount it. • People don’t tend to get to the second step unless the contextual information is very compelling or salient

46. Attribution Theory • There are some cultural differences in attributions. • People in all cultures seem to share the correspondence bias (tendency to infer behaviors as due to dispositions) • But people in non-Western cultures are more likely to take situational and contextual information into account

47. Attribution Theory • The Actor-Observer Bias is that we tend to attribute other people’s behavior to their dispositions but our own to situations (Jones & Nisbett, 1972) • Perceptual: actors look at the situation, observers look at actors • Access to different information: actors have more background about themselves

48. Attribution Theory • False Consensus Effect • We tend to see our own behavior and opinions as typical. Why? • We have a biased sample of similar others among our friends • Our own opinions are more accessible/salient • We fail to realize that our choices reflect our construals and that others have different perceptions • We are motivated to see ourselves as normal & good.

49. Attribution Theory • The Self-Serving Attributional Bias • We tend to take credit for our successes but deny blame for our failures

50. Attribution Theory • The self-serving bias may actually be quite adaptive. • There is more evidence that people take credit for their successes than that they deny responsibility for failures. People may accept responsibility for failure especially if it is a factor they can control. • The self-serving bias is more likely in casual than in close relationships.