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Chapter 4

Chapter 4. Perceiving Persons. 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

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Chapter 4

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  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. Observation: The Elementsof Social Perception—Situations • We often have “scripts” or preset notions about certain types of situations. • Enables us to anticipate the goals, behaviors, and outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting • These scripts help us understand other people’s verbal and nonverbal behavior. How? • We sometimes see what we expect to see in a particular situation. • People use what they know about social situations to explain the causes of human behavior.

  5. 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 ….

  6. 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.

  7. 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

  8. 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)

  9. Jones’s Correspondent Inference Theory • People try to infer from an action whether the act itself corresponds to an enduring personal characteristic of the actor. • People make inferences on the basis of three factors: • Person’s degree of choice • Expectedness of the behavior • Intended effects or consequences of someone’s behavior

  10. Kelley’s Covariation Theory • People make attributions using the covariation principle. • Three kinds of covariation are useful: • Consensus: How are other people reacting to the same stimulus? • Distinctiveness: Is the person’s behavior consistent over time? • Consistency: Does the person react the same or differently to different stimuli?

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. Why Are Personal Attributions Automatic? • Heider: People see dispositions in behavior because of a perceptual bias. • Actor is the conspicuous figure of your attention. • The situation fades into the background. • So people attribute events to factors that are perceptually conspicuous or salient. • Wishful seeing. See what we _____. • Just-world belief.

  16. Priming Effects • Priming: The tendency for recently used words to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information. • Priming can influence person impressions. • Motivations, as well as social behaviors, can be influenced by priming.

  17. The Primacy Effect • The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later. • What accounts for this primacy effect? • There are two basic explanations. • Once we think we have formed an accurate impression of someone, we pay less attention to subsequent information. (Belief Perseverance) • Change of Meaning Hypothesis & Confirmation Bias • Once we have formed an impression, we start to interpret inconsistent information in light of that impression. • The meaning of a trait can be malleable.

  18. 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

  19. How Accurate Are People’s Impressions of Each Other? • Question is provocative, but hard to answer. • Problems: • Often exhibit biases in our social perceptions • Often have little awareness of our limitations, leading us to feel overconfident in our judgments • But remember that biases do NOT necessarily result in error.

  20. Reasons Why We Can Be Competent Social Perceivers • The more experience we have with each other, the more accurate we are. • Although not good at making global judgments of others, we are able to make more circumscribed predictions. • Certain social perception skills can be improved by being taught rules of probability and logic. • We can form more accurate impressions of others when we are motivated.

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