• Social Perception: The processes by which people come to understand one another

Observation: The Elements of Social Perception

A Person’s Physical Appearance

• Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov: Sometimes it takes a mere fraction of a second for you to form impressions of a stranger based on their face

• Our first impressions are influenced in subtle ways by a person’s physical appearance

• Physiognomy: The art of reading character from faces

• Ran Hassin and Yaacov Trope: People prejudge others in photographs as kind-hearted or mean-spirited based on facial features

• People can also read traits into faces based on prior information

• Adults who have baby-faced features tend to be seen as warm, kind, submissive, etc.

  • Human beings are programed by evolution to respond gently to babyish features so that real babies are treated with tender care

  • Leslie Zebrowitz: We associate babyish features with helplessness traits and then overgeneralize this expectation to baby-faced adults

• Alexander Todorov: People are quick to perceive unfamiliar faces as more or less trustworthy by focusing on facial features

  • Seen as trustworthy if they look happy

  • Seen as untrustworthy if they look angry

Perceptions of Situations

• Scripts: Preset notions about certain types of situations

• Knowledge of social settings provides an important context for understanding other people’s verbal and nonverbal behavior

• Our expectations for how situations affect us can influence the way we interpret other people’s facial expressions

Behavioral Evidence

• Identifying actions from movements is easy and allows us to recognize specific individuals strictly by their movements

• We derive meaning from our observations by dividing the continuous stream of human behavior into discrete units

• Darren Newtson: Some perceivers break the behavior stream into a large number of fine units, while others break it into a small number of gross units

  • The manner in which people divide a stream can influence their perceptions

  • Fine Units: Attended more closely, detected more meaningful events, remembered more details about behavior

• Mind Perception: The process by which people attribute humanlike mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people

  • People who identify someone’s actions in high-level terms rather than low-level terms are more likely to attribute humanizing thoughts to that person

  • In general, the more humanlike a target object is, the more likely we are to attribute it to qualities of “mind”

  • Heather Gray: People perceive minds along two dimensions

    • Agency: A target’s ability to plan and execute behavior

    • Experience: The capacity to feel pleasure, pain, and other sensations

    • The more “mind” attributed to a character, the more people like and value it

  • Will people come to see a humanlike mind in machines?

• Nonverbal Behavior: Behavior that reveals a person’s feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues

  • The face expresses emotion in ways that are both innate and understood by people all over the world

  • Are basic emotions are universally recognized from the face, or is the link culturally specific?

    • Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady

    • Both: We can recognize emotions from all cultures, but people in those cultures are a little more accurate (in-group advantage)

  • Darwin: The ability to recognize emotion in others has survival value for all members of a species - it is more important to identify some emotions than others

  • Christine and Ranald Hansen’s anger superiority effect

    • People are quicker to spot angry faces in a crowd rather than faces with neutral, non-threatening emotions

  • People recognize the face of disgust and experience it at a neural level

  • Emoticons filling the gap of nonverbal cues while texting

  • Eye contact

    • As social beings, people are highly attentive to eyes, often following the gaze of others

    • People who look us straight in the eye quickly draw and hold our attention, increase arousal, and activate key social areas of the brain

  • There is a great deal of cultural variation in nonverbal behavior and common greetings

Detecting Truth and Deception

• Ekman and Friesen: Some channels of communication are relatively difficult for deceivers to control, while others are relatively easy

  • Observers who watched tapes that focused on the body were better than detecting deception than were those who saw tapes focused on the face

• Judgements are highly prone to error

• There is a mismatch between the behavioral cues that actually signal deception and those we use to detect deception

  • None of the behavioral cues people look for are very telling

  • Innocent truth tellers are also likely to exhibit signs of stress

• Albert Vrij, Anders Granhag: Lying is harder to do and requires more thinking than telling the truth, so we should induce and focus on behavioral cues that betray cognitive effort

  • Ask ppl to recount their stories in reverse chronological order

  • Urge ppl to maintain eye contact

Attribution: From Elements to Dispositions

• Dispositions: Stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities

Attribution Theories

• Individuals differ in the extent to which they feel a need to explain the events of human behavior

• Attribution Theory: A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior

• Causal attributions:

  • Personal Attributions: Internal characteristics such as ability, personality, mood, or effort

  • Situational Attributions: External factors such as the task, other people, or luck

• Jones and Keith Davis - Correspondent Inference Theory: Each of us tries to understand other people by observing and analyzing their behavior

  • Degree of choice

  • Expectedness of behavior / is it typical or does it depart from the norm?

  • Intended effects or consequences of someone’s behavior

• Harold Kelley - Covariation Theory: People attribute behavior to factors that are present when a behavior occurs and are absent when it does not

  • Consensus Information: How different persons react to the same stimulus

  • Distinctiveness Information: How the same person reacts to different stimuli

  • Consistency Information: What happens to the behavior at another time when the person and the stimulus both remain the same

Attribution Biases

• Daniel Kahneman: The human mind operates by two different systems of thought

  • System 1: Quick, easy, and automatic

  • System 2: Slow, controlled, and effortful

  • Both systems are active when people are awake

  • System 2 takes over when something takes effort, System 1 guides us

• Availability Heuristic: A tendency to estimate the odds that an event will occur by how easily instances of it pop to mind

  • Our estimates of likelihood are heavily influenced by events that are readily available in memory

  • Gives rise to the false-consensus effect (a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors)

  • Social perceptions are influenced more by one vivid life story than by hard statistical facts

    • Base-Rate Fallacy: People are relatively insensitive to numerical base rates, or probabilities and are influenced more by graphic, dramatic events

    • Can lead to various misperceptions of risk

• Counterfactual Thinking: A tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might’ve occurred but did not

  • Kahneman and Miller

  • If we imagine a result that is better than the actual result, we’re likely to experience disappointment, regret, and frustration

  • If the imagined result is worse, then we react with emotions that range from relief and satisfaction to elation

  • Some individuals think in counterfactual terms more than others

    • People who strongly believe in free will are more likely than those who believe their fate is predetermined/unpredictable

• Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior

• First, we identify the behavior and make a quick personal attribution, then we correct or adjust that inference to account for situational influences

  • First step is simple and automatic

  • Second step requires attention, thought, and effort

Culture and Attribution

• American participants made more personal attributions, Indians made more situational attributions

• People in the upper social classes are more likely than those in the lower classes to see behavior in general as caused by internal personal traits

• Western cultures emphasize the individual person and their attributes

• East Asian cultures focus on the background or field that surrounds that person

• It is possible for us to hold differing cultural worldviews at the same time and to perceive others through either lens, depending on which culture is brought to mind

Motivational Biases

• Our social perceptions are sometimes colored by personal hopes, needs, wishes, and preferences

• People have a tendency to see what they want to see

• People tend to take more credit for success than they do blame for failure

• People tend to judge others who are similar to themselves on key characteristics

• Ideological motives (ex: politics) can color our attributions for the behavior of others

• Melven Lerner: The tendency to be critical of victims stems from our deep-seated belief in a just world

  • People need to view the world as a just place in which we “get what we deserve” and “deserve what we get”

  • The belief in a just world can help victims cope and serves as a buffer against stress

  • Political ideology can skew the belief in a just world

  • The more threatened we feel by an apparent injustice, the greater is the need to protect ourselves from the implication that it could happen to us, so we disparage the victim

Integration: From Dispositions to Impressions

Information Integration: The Arithmetic

• Summation Model of Information Integration: The more positive traits there are, the better

• Averaging Model of Information Integration: The higher the average value of all the various traits, the better

• Impression Formation: The process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression

• Information Integration Theory: Impressions formed of others are based on a combination, or integration, of...

  • …personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver

  • …a weighted average, not a simple average, of the target person’s characteristics

Deviations From the Arithmetic

• Perceiver Characteristics

  • Each of us differs in terms of the kinds of impressions we form of others

  • Part of the reason for differences among perceivers is that we tend to use ourselves as a standard when evaluating others

  • A perceiver’s current mood state can also influence the impressions formed of others

  • People who are induced into a happy mood are also more optimistic, more lenient, and less critical in the attributions they make for others who succeed or fail

• Embodiment Effects: Once a person is seen as warm (rather than cold) we assume that this person is also trustworthy, friendly, caring, and helpful

• Priming Effects

  • Priming: The tendency for frequently or recently used concepts to come to mind easily and influence the way we interpret new information

  • The effect of priming on person impressions was first demonstrated by E. Tory Higgins and others

  • Priming seems to work best when the prime words are presented so rapidly that people are not even aware of the exposure

  • Our motivations and even our social behaviors are also subject to the automatic effects of priming without awareness

• Target Characteristics

  • Individuals can reliably be distinguished from one another along five broad traits

    • Some of these factors are easier to judge than others

  • The valence of a trait (whether it is considered good or bad) also influences its impact on our final impressions

  • Trait Negativity Bias: The tendency for negative information to weigh more heavily on our impressions than positive information

    • One bad trait may be enough to tarnish a person’s reputation

  • Our positive expectations of others are so strong that the absence of a favorable evaluation may lead us to assume the worst

    • No negative info is stated, but it’s implied by omission

  • It’s probably adaptive for us to stay alert for negative, potentially threatening info

• Implicit Personality Theory: A network of assumptions about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors

  • Knowing that someone has one trait leads us to infer that they have other traits as well

  • Solomon Asch: Central traits like warm and cold imply the presence of certain other traits and exert a powerful influence on final impressions

  • People differentiate each other first in terms of their warmth and second in terms of their competence, and these are universal dimensions of social cognition

Perceptions of Moral Character

• Geoffrey Goodwin: Distinctly moral traits proved more important than distinctly warm traits at predicting the positive and negative impressions that people form of others

• Perception of morality plays a special role in the impressions we form of others

• People make moral judgements about others instantly and intuitively

• Primacy Effect: The tendency for info presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than info presented later

  • Once perceivers think they have formed an accurate impression of someone, they tend to pay less attention to subsequent info

  • Need for Closure: The desire to reduce ambiguity

  • Change-of-Meaning Hypothesis: Once people have formed an impression, they start to interpret inconsistent info in light of that impression

Confirmation Biases: From Impressions to Reality

• Confirmation Biases: Tendencies to interpret, seek, and create info in ways that verify existing beliefs

• Events that are ambiguous enough to support contrasting interpretations are like inkblots: we see or hear in them what we expect to see or hear

• Belief Perseverance: A tendency to retain to one’s initial beliefs even after they have been discredited

• Once people form a belief, they conjure up explanations that make sense, and those explanations help to perpetuate the belief even after it has been discredited

• Mark Snyder and William Swann: Expecting a certain kind of person, participants unwittingly sought evidence that would confirm their expectations

  • Thinking someone has a certain trait, they engage in a one-sided search for info.

  • In doing so, they create a reality that ultimately supports their beliefs

• 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