Chapter 4 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination.

Chapter 4Stereotypes, Prejudice,

and Discrimination

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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


Observation

The Elements of Social Perception


The impressions we form of others are influenced by superficial aspects of their appearance.

Answer: True… Let’s see why!

Putting Common Sense to the Test…


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.


Table 4.1: First Impressionsin a Fraction of a Second


Why Do We Judge “Baby-Faced” Adults Differently?

• Three possible explanations:– Humans are genetically programmed to respond

gently to infantile features.– We learn to associate infantile features with

helplessness and then generalize this expectation to baby-faced adults.

– There is an actual link between physical appearance and behavior.


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 Do Scripts Influence Social Perception?

• 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.


Observation: The Elements of Social Perception—Behavioral Evidence

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

• How we divide a stream of behavior can influence perception in important ways.


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


Figure 4.1: How Good are Peopleat Identifying Emotions in the Face?

Insert Figure 4.1: How Good are People at Identifying Emotions in the Face? about here

From H.A. Elfenbein and N. Ambady, "On the Universality and Cultural Specificity of Emotion Recognition: A Meta-Analysis," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 128, 2002, pp. 203-235. Reprinted with permission.


Elfenbein & Ambady (2003)

0

1020

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5060

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8090

Accuracy in

Recognizing

Emotions

Chinese Living inChina

Chinese Living in USChinese Americans NonchineseAmericans

Who Was Showed Pictures of American Faces


Figure 4.2: Some Common E-mail “Emoticons”

Reprinted with permission from "Smileys" © O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Orders and Information: 800-998-9938, www.oreilly.com


Other Nonverbal Cues

• Body language• Eye contact or gaze• Physical touch• Cultural differences


Adaptively, people are skilled at knowing when someone is lying rather than telling the truth.

Answer: False… Let’s see why!



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 hard

to control.


Table 4.2: Can the “Experts” Distinguish Truth and Deception?

From P. Ekman and M. O'Sullivan, "Who Can Catch a Liar?" American Psychologist, 46, 913-920, 1991. Copyright © 1991 American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.


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


Attribution

From Elements to Dispositions


Attribution Theories

• Attribution theory describes the process by which we make attributions.

• Heider: Explanations can be grouped into two categories:

– Personal Attributions– Situational Attributions


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


Figure 4.3: What Does this Speechwriter Really Believe?

Reprinted from Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 3, "The Attribution of Attitudes," by E.G. Jones and K.E. Harris, pp. 1-24. Copyright (c) 1967, with permission from Elsevier.


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?


Figure 4.4: Kelley’s Covariation Theory


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.


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.


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– Base-rate fallacy– Counterfactual thinking


Table 4.3: The False Consensus Effect


Like social psychologists, people are sensitive to situational causes when explaining the behavior of others.




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

• Let’s take another look at the Jones and Harris (1967) study…


Figure 4.3: What Does this Speechwriter Really Believe? A Second Look

Reprinted from Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 3, "The Attribution of Attitudes," by E.G. Jones and K.E. Harris, pp. 1-24. Copyright (c) 1967, with permission from Elsevier.


Figure 4.5: Fundamental Attribution Error and the TV Quiz Show

From L. Ross, T.M. Amabile, and J.L. Steinmetz, "Social Roles, Social Control, and Biases in Social Perception Processes," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 485-494. Copyright (c) by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.


Figure 4.6: Two-Step Model of the Attribution Process


Findings Supporting the Two-Step Model of the Attributional Process

• People often form a quick impression based on a brief sample of behavior.

• More likely to commit the F.A.E. when one is cognitively busy or distracted.


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.


Actor-Observer Effect

• Our tendency to make personal attributions for the behavior of others and situational attributions for ourselves.


Figure 4.7: Fundamental Attribution Error: A Western Bias?

From J.G. Miller (1984) "Culture and the Development of Everyday Social Explanation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 961-978. Copyright (c) 1984 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.


Figure 4.8: Attributions Within Cultural Frames

From Y. Hong, M.W. Morris, C. Chiu and V. Benet-Martinez, "Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition," American Psychologist, 55, 709-720, 2000. Copyright © 2000 American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.


Motivational Biases

• Dunning (2001): The need for self-esteem biases social perceptions in subtle ways.

• Belief in a Just World: The belief that individuals get what they deserve in life.

– Can lead to a tendency to disparage victims


Integration

From Dispositions to Impressions


Information Integration: The Arithmetic

• How do we combine personal attributions into a single coherent picture of the person?

– Summation model or averaging model?

• Information Integration Theory: Impressions formed of others are based on:

– Personal dispositions of the perceiver; and– A weighted average of a target person’s traits


Perceiver Characteristics

• We differ in the kinds of impressions we form of others.

• Our current, temporary mood can influence the impressions we form of others.

• To some extent, impression formation is in the eye of the beholder.


Priming Effects

• 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.


Bargh & Chartrand (1999)

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Percent that

Continued

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Signal

Primed with Achievement-

related Words

Control Group


From J.A. Bargh, M. Chen and L. Burrows (1996) "Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation and Action," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244. Copyright (c) 1971 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 4.9: The Priming of Social Behavior Without Awareness


Target Characteristics

• All traits are not created equal.• The valence of a trait affects its impact on our

impressions.– Trait Negativity Bias


Implicit Personality Theories

• Implicit Personality Theory: A network of assumptions that we make about the relationships among traits and behaviors.

• Central Traits: Traits that exert a powerful influence on overall impressions.

– e.g., warm and cold vs. polite and blunt


Asch (1946)

• Intelligent• Industrious• Impulsive• Critical• Stubborn• Envious

• Envious• Stubborn• Critical• Impulsive• Industrious• Intelligent

Rated This Person More Positively

One group read this description: Other group read this description:


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.


Primacy Effect: Explanation #1

• Once we think we have formed an accurate impression of someone, we pay less attention to subsequent information.

• People differ in their need for closure.– Desire to reduce ambiguity– Primacy effect less likely to occur for those who are

lower in their need for closure


Primacy Effect: Explanation #2

• Change of Meaning Hypothesis– 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.


Confirmation Biases

From Impressions to Reality


People are slow to change their first impressions on the basis of new information.




Confirmation Bias

• Once we make up our mind about something, how likely are we to change it, even when confronted with new evidence?

• Confirmation Bias: Our tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs.


Figure 4.10: Mixed Evidence: Does It Extinguish or Fuel First Impressions?

Darley and Gross, 1983.


Perseverance of Beliefs

• We interpret ambiguous events in ways that confirm our existing beliefs.

• Belief Perseverance: The tendency to maintain beliefs even after they have been discredited.

– Can be reduced or eliminated when we are asked to consider why alternative explanations may be true.


Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing

• Do we seek information objectively or are we inclined to confirm the suspicions we already hold?

• Situational circumstances can influence our tendency to engage in confirmatory hypothesis testing.


The notion that we can create a “self-fulfilling prophecy” by getting others to behave in ways we expect is a myth.




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


Figure 4.11: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy as a Three-Step Process


Social Perception

The Bottom Line


Figure 4.12: The Processes of Social Perception


People are more accurate at judging the personalities of friends and acquaintances than of strangers.




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.


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.

• Our social perception skills can be enhanced.• We can form more accurate impressions of

others when we are motivated.

Chapter 4 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination.

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