Perceiving Persons

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Perceiving Persons
Tom Farsides 08/10/03
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Lecture Overview

• Attribution theories
• Cognitive heuristics, errors, and biases
• Priming effects
• Implicit personality theories
• Primacy effects
• Confirmation biases

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Social perception

• This subject concerns the qualities that people
  perceive in others and the factors...that
  contribute to these perceptions
• Zebrowitz (1995, p. 583)

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Nonverbal behavior

• The six innate and universal basic emotions
  (SHAFDS)

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Attribution theories

• Attribution theories describe how people attempt
  to explain the causes of behaviour.
• Heider (1958) differentiated between personal
  and situational attributions.
• Another common distinction is between stable and
  unstable causes of behaviour.
• Another is made in terms of controllability.

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Correspondent inference theory (Jones Davis,
1965)

• What is a correspondent inference?
• Influenced by
• Perceived choice (CI if high)
• Intended effects (CI if few benefits to actor)
• Expectedness (CI if unexpected)

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Kelleys (1967) covariation theory

• We attribute causality to factors that co-vary
  with behaviours.
• Behaviour can be attributed to the actor, a
  stimulus they are reacting to, or the situation
  they are acting in.
• Three types of covariation information may be
  used.
• Consensus
• Same stimulus Different people.
• Distinctiveness
• Same person Different stimuli.
• Consistency
• Same person Same stimulus.

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Kelleys (1967) covariation theory
LOW Other people do not stroke Defor.
LOW You tend to stroke any dog you see.
HIGH You stroke Defor every time you meet.
PERSONAL ATTRIBUTION You like dogs.
You stroke Defor (a dog).
HIGH Other people tend to stroke Defor.
HIGH You tend not to stroke dogs.
HIGH You stroke Defor every time you meet.
STIMULUS ATTRIBUTION Defor is cute.
LOW Other people do not stroke Defor.
HIGH You tend not to stroke dogs.
LOW You have never stroked Defor before or since.
SITUATION ATTRIBUTION You were locked in a room
with Defor.
CONSENSUS DISTINCTIVENESS CONSISTENCY
x-persons x-stimuli
x-situations
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Cognitive heuristics

• Cognitive heuristics (rules of thumb)
• effective
• often adequate
• a greater chance of being wrong
• E.g., The availability heuristic

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The fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977)

• In explaining anothers behavior, we
  over-emphasise personal factors and downplay
  situational factors.

Jones Harris (1967)
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Miller (1984) Individualism and the
correspondence bias
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Gilbert Malone (1995) A two-step model of the
attribution process
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The actor-observer effect (Jones Nisbett, 1972)

• Actors tend to attribute their behaviour to
  situational factors while observers tend to
  attribute the same behaviours to dispositional
  factors.
• Differential information explanation.
• Differential focus explanation.

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Primacy effect

• The tendency for information presented early in
  a sequence to have more impact on impressions
  than information presented later.
• Asch (1946)
• Intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical,
  stubborn, and envious leads to more positive
  impressions than the other way around.
• Lazy and stubborn explanations.

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Implicit personality theories

• The network of assumptions commonly made about
  relationships among types of people, traits and
  behaviours.
• Knowing one trait a person has leads us to assume
  or infer the person has other traits and
  behaviors.
• e.g., blondes...
• Asch (1946)
• Intelligent, skillful, industrious, _____,
  determined, practical and cautious.

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Priming

• The tendency for frequent or recent concepts to
  easily come to mind and influence the way we
  interpret new information.
• Higgins et al. (1977)
• Impressions of same adventurer affected by
  positive or negative primes.
• Bargh Pietromonaco (1982)
• Subliminally presented primes have most influence
  on subsequent impression formation.
• Bargh Chartrand (1999)
• Primes affect subsequent behaviour.
• Bargh et al. (1996)
• Primes influence subsequent social behaviour too.

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Bargh et al. (1996) Priming of social behavior
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Biases confirming expectancies from stereotypes
Darley Gross (1983) Viewing Hannahs mixed
performance led to perceived verification of both
low and high expectations, with evidence of the
opposite ignored or rationalised
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Confirmatory hypothesis testing

• Darley Gross (1983)
• demonstrate that people will interpret ambiguous
  or mixed information in ways to confirm existing
  theories.
• Snyder Swann (1978)
• demonstrate that people with existing theories
  will bias the information they collect when
  evaluating those theories.
• The evidence collected is biased enough to cause
  others shown it to confirm the original
  persons existing theory.
• Cf. Adorno et al.s (1950) validation of the
  authoritarian personality.

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Resisting confirmation biases

• Elaborate alternative theories, reasons they
  might be true, and potential evidence for them.
• Be sceptical about the truth of existing beliefs
  and seek accuracy instead of confirmation.
• Be wary of information and information-seeking
  tools provided by others.
• Bias information-seeking in favour of trying to
  disconfirm your expectations.

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The self-fulfilling prophecy

• Perceivers expectations can lead to their own
  fulfilment (Merton, 1948).
• Rosenthal Jacobson (1968)
• Pygmalion in the Classroom
• Teachers told late bloomers had IQ scores
  indicating an imminent growth spurt.
• Eight months later, these randomly selected
  children had higher IQ increases and received
  better teacher evaluations than control children.
• Remember Darley Gross (1983) and Snyder Swann
  (1978).

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Rosenthal Jacobson (1968)Average gain in IQ
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Challenging the self-fulfilling prophecy

• Rosenthal (1985)
• Teacher expectation successfully predicts student
  performance 36 percent of the time.
• Brehm et al. (2002) report this as confirmation
  of the self-fulfilling prophesy.
• Jussim et al. (1996)
• Point out that - unlike in Rosenthal Jacobson
  (1968) - teachers often have good reasons for
  their expectations.
• Students perform in accordance with these
  expectations because both the performance and the
  expectations are caused by some third factor,
  e.g. talent and application.
• Is Rosenthal (1985) evidence against the
  self-fulfilling prophesy, i.e., only 36 (with
  64 of expectations not being fulfilled)?