Lecture 3. Social Perception

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• Lecture 3. Social Perception

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• Do attractive people have any advantages?
• Are they treated better than less attractive?
• Is it important to look good on an application
  photo?
• According to investigations the answer to these
  questions is yes. We could show that people are
  perceived more positively the more attractive
  they are. 

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Attractive female faces
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Unattractive female faces
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Attractive male faces
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Unattractive male faces
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• The results are alarmingly clear. We found an
  enormously influencing attractiveness-stereotype
  
• The more attractive the presented faces were, the
  more successful, content, friendly, intelligent,
  socialble, accessible, exciting, creative and
  busy the persons were estimated.
• The opposite applies to unattractive faces The
  more unattractive the faces were the more
  negative characteristics were attributed to the
  person. 

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Social perception

• refers to the processes through which we use
  available information to form impressions of
  other people, to assess what they are like.
• the study of how we form impressions of and make
  inferences about other people
• Social perceptions can obviously be flawed - even
  skilled observers can misperceive, misjudge, and
  reach the wrong conclusions.
• Once we form wrong impressions, they are likely
  to persist.

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• In a study by Rosenhan, eight pseudopatients who
  were actually research investigators gained entry
  into mental hospitals by claiming to hear voices.
  During the intake interviews, the pseudopatients
  gave true accounts of their backgrounds, life
  experiences, and present (quite ordinary)
  psychological condition. They falsified only
  their names and their complaint of hearing
  voices. Once in the psychiatric ward, they ceased
  simulating any signs of abnormality. They
  reported that the voices had stopped, talked
  normally with other patients, and made
  observations in their notebooks. Although some of
  the other patients suspected that the
  investigators were not really ill, the staff did
  not. Even upon discharge, they were still
  diagnosed as schizophrenic, though now it was
  "schizophrenia in remission".
• Rosenhan described his results to other mental
  hospitals, and their administrators said they
  could not be taken in by such a ruse. Rosenhan
  then told them that they would be visited by a
  pseudopatient in the next 3 months, and he
  challenged them to identify who it was. During
  the 3 month period, 193 patients were admitted,
  and the psychologists identified 41 they thought
  were pseudopatients. In reality, Rosenhan had not
  sent anybody!

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• How do we form impressions of others? How do we
  combine the diverse info we receive about someone
  into a coherent overall impression?
• Nonverbal Communication
• Impression Formation and Management
• Attribution

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Nonverbal communication

• the way in which people communicate,
  intentionally or unintentionally without words -
  tone of voice, touch, gestures, facial
  expressions, etc.
• Nonverbal behavior is used to express emotion,
  convey attitudes, communicate personality traits,
  and to facilitate or modify verbal communication

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Happy - Sad
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Angry - Fearful
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Disgust - surprise
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• Charles Darwin believed that human emotional
  expressions are universal - that all humans both
  encode decode expressions in the same way
• Modern research has confirmed Darwin's assertion
  for 6 major emotional expressions anger,
  happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, sadness
• Culture plays a significant influence in
  emotional expression. Display rules that are
  unique to each culture dictate when different
  nonverbal behaviors, e.g., crying are appropriate
  to display by whom
• It is sometimes difficult to accurately interpret
  facial expressions because people often display
  blends of multiple affects simultaneously

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• Other Channels of Nonverbal Communication
• Eye contact gaze are also powerful nonverbal
  cues
• Personal space is a nonverbal behavior w/ wide
  variation across cultures
• Emblems are nonverbal gestures that have
  well-understood definitions w/in a given culture
• Body movement
• Multichannel Nonverbal Communication
• We usually receive information from multiple
  channels simultaneously in our everyday
  interactions
• Archer Alert's (1991) Social Interpretation
  Task (SIT) people are able to interpret such cues
  fairly accurately by utilizing multiple cues,
  though some people e.g., extroverts are better
  decoders than others, e.g., introverts

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Gender Differences in Nonverbal Communication

• When people are telling the truth, women are
  better both at decoding and encoding nonverbal
  behavior than males. However, men are better at
  detecting lies
• The social-role theory, which posits that sex
  differences in social behavior are due to the
  division of labor between the sexes in society,
  can be used to explain these male-female
  differences

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Detecting deceptions from nonverbal cues

• Not all nonverbal cues are equally instructive
  revealing the lie.
• Smiling smiling is a common device used by
  deceivers
• microexpressions of face avoid gaze of others,
  blink frequently
• Voice and body movements liars have a higher
  pitch and pause a lot
• Fidgety movements of feet and hands, restless
  shifts in body posture

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Forming Impressions

• Kelley (1967) did a study in which two different
  sketches of a guest lecturer were given to
  students. Sketches were identical, except that
  half the people were told the guest was cold and
  the rest were told he was warm. Those who had
  read that the guest professor was cold rated him
  as less considerate, sociable, popular, good
  natured, humorous, and humane than those who had
  read he was warm. Why did this happen?

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• People make assumptions about how personality
  traits are related - which ones go together and
  which do not.
• These assumptions are called Implicit Personality
  Theories. It is a special kind of stereotyping -
  we assume that warm people or cold people have
  particular attributes.
• EX Upon learning that a person is a pessimist,
  we also tend to assume she is humorless,
  irritable, and unpopular.
• We tend to judge persons who have one good trait
  as generally good, and who have one bad trait as
  generally bad. This tendency to perceive
  personalities as clusters of either good or bad
  traits is called the halo effect.

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Individual differences in IPTs.

• We don't all form our IPTs the same way. Our
  unique experiences direct our attention to
  particular trait categories when we form
  impressions.
• EX Some of us pay more attention to
  intelligence, others to friendliness or
  attractiveness. Peoples impressions reflect as
  much about their own modes of perception as they
  do about the characteristics of the person being
  perceived.
• Suppose two people meet the same intelligent,
  friendly individual. If one attends more to
  intelligence, she is likely to form an impression
  that the individual is industrious, imaginative,
  and skillful - all traits associated with
  intelligence in most people's mental maps. If the
  other attends more to friendliness, she if likely
  to form an impression that the individual is
  popular, good-natured, and warm - traits
  associated with friendly. Both impressions may be
  valid, and they are not necessarily
  contradictory, but they are very different.

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Why do we need to form impressions?

• Ordering the world
• We often try to simplify the complex flow of
  incoming info by putting people into useful
  categories. These classifications help to specify
  how various objects or events are related or
  similar to each other.

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Why do we classify people and things?

• 1. Simplify perception by grouping together
  similar experiences. We can pay attention to some
  stimuli while ignoring others.
• EX If we perceive a neighborhood as friendly, we
  can walk down the street without attending
  carefully to every look from every passerby.
• 2. Allow us to go beyond the info that is
  immediately available - can infer additional
  facts.
• EX When we recognize a discussion as a
  bargaining session, we infer that the
  participants represent groups with conflicting
  interests. We may also infer that the opening
  statements are merely initial bargaining
  positions, and that vicious verbal attacks do not
  necessarily signify personal animosity.

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Why do we classify people and things?

• 3. Help us know how to relate to people and
  object.
• EX In friendly neighborhoods, we can smile at
  strangers and don't have to hold on to our wallet
  so tightly.
• EX We can tell secrets to people who are
  trustworthy, and remain tight-lipped in the
  presence of gossips.
• 4. Allow us to predict behavior.
• EX A friend will help us to change a flat tire.
• EX A vegetarian will turn down a steak dinner.

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How do we decide how to classify people and
things?

• 1. Can classify people in any number of ways -
  male, midwesterner, tennis player, introvert.
  What determines which will be used?
• a. Purposes of the perceiver. We use concepts to
  determine how people will affect the pursuit of
  our goals.
• EX Airport security guard must decide if rushing
  travelers are dangerous or safe, require a close
  search, or merely a cursory check. Hence, she
  classifies passersby as tourists or smugglers,
  terrorists or vacationers. She looks for traits
  that fit her concept of a potentially dangerous
  person.
• EX In contrast, travelers are more likely to
  look at each other in terms of ways that reveal
  the potential for rewarding interaction - age,
  sex, physical attractiveness, smoking habits -
  and classify people in terms of these things.

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How do we decide how to classify people and
things?What determines which will be used?

• b. Social context. Refers to activities that are
  appropriate in a given setting, to the roles
  ordinarily enacted there, and to the people who
  are present. The social context strongly
  influences the ways we label people and their
  behavior.
• EX If we are at the beach, and somebody comes
  along wearing a swimsuit, spreads out a towel and
  lies down on it, we might label their behavior
  are "relaxation" and perhaps think the person is
  a vacationer. If a person did the same thing in a
  department store, we might think they are crazy.
• c. Accessibility in memory. How easily can the
  classification be summoned from memory?
  Experience may make some classifications more
  accessible than others.
• EX Suppose a student learns that her roommate
  has broken both legs while mountain climbing. If
  she has recently been discussing with her parents
  or friends how foolhardy some students are, she
  may be more likely to perceive her friend as
  reckless than as adventurous.

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Impressions can be self-fulfilling prophesies.

• Because our own actions evoke appropriate
  reactions from others, our initial impressions
  are often confirmed by the reactions of others.
• EX Men were given photographs of relatively
  attractive or relatively unattractive women. They
  then had phone conversations with the woman they
  thought was in the picture. They tended to act
  differently towards the women they thought were
  attractive, and the women, in turn, tended to act
  differently towards them - the "attractive" women
  tended to act more poised, confident, amiable,
  sociable and outgoing.

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Using Mental Shortcuts When Forming Impressions

• The Role of Accessibility Priming
• When a person's behavior is ambiguous, it is
  unclear which theory or trait applies to that
  person. Under those circumstances, impressions
  may be determined by the accessibility of trait
  categories, i.e., the ease with which different
  thoughts and ideas can be brought to mind
• Some traits are chronically accessible due to a
  person's past experience
• Other traits can become accessible through
  priming, a process whereby a particular trait
  become more accessible due to recent experiences
• Higgins et al., (1977) illustrate the operation
  of priming in their study. When people memorized
  positive or negative words and later read a
  ambiguous paragraph about a character named
  Donald formed an impression those who
  memorized positive words formed a more positive
  impression of him than their counterparts who
  memorized negative words

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Attribution (Heider, 1958)

• is the process through which we link behavior to
  its causes - to the intentions, dispositions and
  events that explain why people act the way they
  do.
• Internal attribution the inference that a
  person is behaving in a certain way because of
  something about him or her, such as personal
  attitudes, character or personality
• External attribution - the inference that a
  person is behaving in a certain way because of
  situation he or she is in the assumption that
  most people would respond the same way in that
  situation

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Dispositional vs. situational attributions (or
internal vs. external).

• Must decide whether behavior should be attributed
  to characteristics of the person who performed it
  (dispositional) or to the surrounding situation.
  Put another way, are the causes of an action
  internal to the actor or external?
• EX Suppose neighbor is unemployed. You might
  judge that he is lazy, irresponsible or unable
  (dispositional attribution). Alternatively, you
  might attribute unemployment to racial
  discrimination, evils of capitalism, poor state
  of the economy (situational).

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Social consequences

• 1. Dispositional attributions define suffering
  due to personal problems - solutions involve
  treating the individual
• 2. Situational defines suffering as a social
  problem - prescribes changes in the social
  structure.
• EX Status of women may be attributed to personal
  dispositions (fear of success, poorer skills).
  Solution is psychotherapy, assertiveness
  training, etc. Or, it could be due to sexual
  prejudice and discrimination - solution may be
  the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), adequate
  daycare, etc.

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Individual consequences

• 1. Depressives have a different attributional
  style than non-depressives. They are often more
  realistic in their attributions, which may be why
  they are depressed!
• 2. Successes are more likely to endure if we
  attribute the success to our own internal
  characteristics, rather than external causes.
• EX Suppose you lose weight. If you attribute
  your success to a diet program, once you are off
  the program you may regain the weight. If you
  think you "did it yourself," then you'll be less
  likely to need outside help to maintain the
  weight loss.

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Two Theories of Attribution

• Correspondence Inference Theory (Jones Davis,
  1965)
• Kelleys Covariation Model Theory (Kelley, 1972)

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• Correspondent Inference theory from Acts to
  Dispositions
• The theory that we make internal attribution
  about a person when there are (a) few noncommon
  effects of his or her behavior and (b) the
  behavior is unexpected
• The Role of Noncommon Effects
• Noncommon Effects effects produced by a
  particular course of actions that could not be
  produces by alternative course of actions

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The Role of Expectations

• We learn more about people when they behave in
  unexpected ways than when they behave in expected
  ways.
• 
  

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Expectancies

• Category-based expectancies expectations about
  people based on the groups to which they belong,
  such as expecting someone to love going to
  parties because he or she belongs to party-loving
  fraternity (Mick Jagger has graduated from London
  School of Economics)
• Target-based expectancies expectations about a
  person based on his or her past actions, such as
  expecting someone to go to the beach on vacation
  because he or she has always gone to the beach in
  the past

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The Covariation Model Internal versus External
Attributions

• The theory which states that in order to form an
  attribution about what caused a persons
  behavior, we systematically note the pattern
  between the presence (or absence) of possible
  causal factors and weather or not the behavior
  occurs.
• What kind of information do we examine for
  covariation?

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3 types of information

• Consensus information refers to how other
  people behave towards the same stimuli
• Distinctiveness information refers to how the
  actor responds to other stimuli
• Consistency information refers to the frequency
  with which the observed behavior between the same
  actor and the same stimuli occurs across time and
  circumstances
• Internal attribution consensus and
  distinctiveness are low, but consistency is high
• External attribution if consensus,
  distinctiveness and consistency are high

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Attributional biases

• Fundamental attribution error
• When looking at the behavior of others, we tend
  to underestimate the impact of situational forces
  and overestimate the impact of dispositional
  forces. Most people ignore the impact of role
  pressures and other situational constraints on
  others and see behavior as caused by people's
  intentions, motives, and attitudes.

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The Actor-Observer Effect

• The tendency for people to attribute their own
  behavior to external causes but that of others to
  internal factors.
• The role of perceptual salience we notice other
  behavior more than their situation, so too we
  notice our own situation more than our own
  behavior.
• The role of Information availability actors
  have more information about themselves than
  observers do, they are far more aware than
  observers are of both the similarities and
  differences in their behavior across time and
  across situations

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SelfServing Attributions(used when self-esteem
is threatened)

• Explanation of ones successes that credit
  internal, dispositional factors and explanations
  for ones failure that blame external,
  situational factors
• Defensive attributions explanations for
  behavior that avoid feeling of vulnerability and
  mortality
• Unrealistic optimism a form of defensive
  attribution wherein people think that good things
  are more likely to happen to them than to their
  peer and vise versa
• Belief in a Just World a form of defensive
  attribution wherein people assume that bad things
  happen to bad people and that good things happen
  to good people