Psychology 331 Social Psychology

1. Psychology 331Social Psychology Social Beliefs and Judgments Chapter 3

2. Social Perception • The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people

3. Nonverbal Behavior • Facial Expressions of Emotion • Nonverbal Communication • Eye contact • Use of personal space • Use of gestures • Gender Differences

4. Causal Attributions • Attribution Theory • A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior • Attribution • An inference about why an event took place or about a person’s disposition

5. Theories of Attribution • Fritz Heider’s “Naïve Theory” • Everyday people’s everyday judgments about everyday events • Important Features • Interpret events: Look for stable and enduring factors • Internal forces (personal) vs. External forces (environment)

6. Theories of Attribution • Jones & Davis – Correspondent Inference Theory • How do you characterize others by observing their behavior • Four factors

7. Correspondent Inference Theory • Social Desirability • Jones, Davis, & Gergen’s Submariner/ Astronaut Study • Non-Common Effects • Hedonic Relevance • Personalism

8. Jones, Davis, & Gergen (1961) Expression DV: What is the person really like? (confidence)

9. Correspondent Inference Theory • Social Desirability • Jones, Davis, & Gergen’s Submariner/ Astronaut Study • Non-Common Effects • Hedonic Relevance • Personalism

10. Theories of Attribution • Kelley’s Covariation model • Person as a calculator • Behavior may be attributed to 3 factors: • Person • Entity • Circumstance

11. Kelley’s Covariation Model • Three types of information • Distinctiveness • Does the person act this way only with regard to this stimulus? • Consistency • Does the person act this way toward the same stimulus at other times in other situations? • Consensus • Does everyone act this way toward this stimulus?

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13. Important Principles • Discounting Principle • The role of a given cause in accounting for a given effect is discounted when other plausible causes are present • Augmenting Principle • If, for a given effect, you have both a facilitative cause (helps outcome) and a plausible inhibitory cause (gets in the way of the outcome), then the role of the facilitative cause will be judged greater than if there had not been an inhibitory cause

14. Sigall & McKella Discounting Augmenting DV: Trust in man’s praise

15. Theories of Attribution • Weiner’s Taxonomy of Success and Failure Attributions • Three dimensions • Locus – internal or external • Stability • Controllability

17. We Do Make Errors • Fundamental Attribution Error • Tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors, and to underestimate the role of situational factors • Jones & Harris (1967) • Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz

20. We Do Make Errors • Actor/Observer Difference • Tendency to see other people’s behavior as dispositionally caused, while focusing more on the role of situational factors when explaining one’s own behavior • Storms (1973)

21. We Do Make Errors • Self-Serving Attributions • Explanations for one’s successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one’s failures that blame external, situational factors.

22. Who is Going to Heaven? • Class Demonstration

23. How accurate are our attributions and impressions? • First impressions are not very accurate • We get better as we get to know others • But overall accuracy is still not that impressive

24. Social Cognition • The study of how people select, interpret, and use information to make judgment about the social world.

25. Schemas • Cognitive structures that people use to organize their knowledge about the world • Function of schemas: Continuity • Kelley’s (1950) warm/cold study

27. Problem with Schemas • Distortion! As a result of: • Maintaining Self-Esteem • Hastorf & Cantril (1954) – football study • Primacy Effect • Jones et al. (1968) – questions study • Belief Perseverance Effect • Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard (1975) – suicide notes study

28. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy • People have an expectation about what another person is like, which • Influences how they act toward that person, which • Causes that person to behave in a way consistent with the original expectation

29. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy • Rosenthal & Jacobsen (1968) • Blooming Children Study • Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid (1977) • Attractive woman study

30. Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid Unattractive Attractive Picture of Woman DV: Woman Judged as Warm and Friendly

31. Mental Strategies & Shortcuts • Judgmental Heuristics • Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently

32. Availability Heuristic • People base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind • Vivid events are easily recalled and thus bias estimates • Schwarz et al. (1991) • Assertiveness study

33. Counterfactual Thinking • Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

34. Representative Heuristic • People classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case. • People tend to ignore base-rate information

35. Anchoring & Adjustment Heuristic • Mental shortcut that involves using a number or value as a starting point, and then adjusting one’s answer away from this anchor • People often do not adjust sufficiently