Perceiving & evaluating other people
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Transcript of Perceiving & evaluating other people
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Perceiving & evaluating other people
Why do we evaluate others? all of us are naïve psychologists
Are we accurate? often however, our judgments can suffer from a
number of biaseswhen not using all our resourceswhen we have limited informationwhen we have hidden motives/goals
• e.g., our self-esteem is threatened
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Social Comparison
Downward social comparison Compare ourselves to others who are not as
good (i.e. could be worse!) Upward social comparison
Comparing ourselves to others who are doing better (gives us hope/creates optimism)
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Self-fulfilling Prophecies
When our beliefs and expectations create reality
Beliefs & expectations influence our behavior & others’
Pygmalion effect person A believes that person B has a
particular characteristic person B may begin to behave in accordance
with that characteristic
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Studies of the Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Rosenthal & Fode tested whether labeling would affect outcome divided students into 2 groups and gave them randomly
selected rats 1 group was told they had a group of “super genius” rats
and the other was told they had a group of “super moron” rats
all students told to train rats to run mazes “genius” rat group ended up doing better than the
“moron” rat group b/c of the expectations of the students
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Attributions from behavior
Attribution a claim about the cause of someone’s
behavior seeking a reason for the occurrence of
events/behaviors Heider
early researcher we intuitively attribute others’ actions to
personality characteristics
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Person vs. Situation Attributions Have to decide whether behavior is due to
something about personality, or whether anyone would do same thing in that situation
Kelley’s 3 questions in making an attribution does this person regularly behave this way in this
situation? [distictiveness] do others regularly behave this way in this situation?
[consensus] does this person behave this way in many other
situations? [consistency]
Example: Susan is angry while driving in a traffic jam
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Kelley’s Attributional Logic
(1) Does Susan regularly get angry in traffic jams?
YES(2) Do many other people get angry in traffic jams?
NO
NO
YES
(3) Does Susan get angry in many other situations?
No personality or situational attribution
Situational attribution: traffic jams make people mad
Personality attribution, general
Personality attribution, particular
YES NO
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Kelley – in summary
When are we likely to make internal attributions? Low consensus High consistency Low distinctiveness
(see example with “boss insulting customer” on p. 683)
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Person bias in attributions
People give too much weight to personality and not enough to situational variables
Known as person bias a.k.a. fundamental attribution error
Conditions promoting person bias when task has goal of assessment of personality when person is cognitively loaded
Conditions promoting a situation bias when goal is to judge the situation
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Two-stage Model of Attributions
First stage is rapid & automatic bias according to goal (person/situation)
Second stage is slower & controlled won’t occur if cognitively loaded we correct our automatic attribution
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Two-stage Model of Attributions
What kind of person is Joe?
How funny is the TV comedy?
Person: Joe laughs easily
Situation: the TV show is funny
Observer’s goalAutomatic Attribution
Controlled Attribution
Revision: could be a funny show
Revision: maybe Joe laughs easily
Book example: Joe laughs hysterically while watching a TV comedy. What can we conclude?
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Cross-cultural differences
Western culture people are in charge of
own destinies more attributions to
personality Some Eastern cultures
fate in charge of destiny
more attributions to situation
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Actor-Observer Bias Attribute personality causes of behavior when
evaluating someone else’s behavior Attribute situational when evaluating our own
behavior Why?
hypothesis 1: we know our behavior changes from situation to situation,
but we don’t know this about others hypothesis 2:
when we see others perform an action, we concentrate on actor, not situation -- when we perform an action, we see environment, not person
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Prior Information Effects
Mental representations of people (schemas) can effect our interpretation of them Kelley’s study
students had a guest speaker before the speaker came, half got a written bio
saying speaker was “very warm”, half got bio saying speaker was “rather cold”
“very warm” group rated guest more positively than “rather cold” group
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Effects of Personal AppearanceThe attractiveness bias
physically attractive people are rated higher on intelligence, competence, sociability, morality
studiesteachers rate attractive children as smarter, and higher
achievingadults attribute cause of unattractive child’s
misbehavior to personality, attractive child’s to situation
judges give longer prison sentences to unattractive people
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Effects of Personal Appearance
The baby-face bias people with rounder heads, large eyes,
small jawbones, etc. rated as more naïve, honest, helpless, kind, and warm than mature-faced
generalize to animals, women, babies
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Attitudes
What is an attitude? predisposition to behave in a certain way toward some
people, group, or objects can be negative or positive
Cognitive dissonance theory Festinger we we need our attitudes to be consistent with our
behavior it is uncomfortable for us when they aren’t we seek ways to decrease discomfort caused by
inconsistency
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Dissonance-reducing MechanismsAvoiding dissonant information
we attend to information in support of our existing views, rather than information that doesn’t support them
Firming up an attitude to be consistent with an action once we’ve made a choice to do something,
lingering doubts about our actions would cause dissonance, so we are motivated to set them aside
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Dissonance-reducing Mechanisms Changing an attitude to justify an action
when a person does something counter to their stated beliefs, then justify the deed by modifying their attitude
Insufficient-justification effectchange in attitude that occurs because person
cannot justify an already completed action without modifying attitude
optimizing conditions include external justification, free choice, when action would cause harm
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Insufficient-justification effect
Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) gave subjects a boring task, then asked subjects to lie
to the next subject and say the experiment was exciting
paid ½ the subjects $1, other ½ $20 then asked subjects to rate boringness of task $1 group rated the task as far more fun than the $20
group
each group needed a justification for lying $20 group had an external justification of money since $1 isn’t very much money, $1 group said task was
fun
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Using Attitudes as Ways to “Justify” Injustice
Just-world bias a tendency to believe that life is fair
it would seem horrible to think that you can be a really good person and bad things could happen to you anyway
Just-world bias leads to “blaming the victim” we explain others’ misfortunes as being their
faulte.g., she deserved to be raped, what was she
doing in that neighborhood anyway?
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Stereotypes
What is a stereotype? schemas about a group of people a belief held by members of one group about
members of another group how can we study stereotypes?
early studies just asked peopletoday’s society is sensitized to harmful effects of
stereotypingneed different ways of studying
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Studying stereotypes3 levels of stereotypes in today’s research
public what we say to others about a group
private what we consciously think about a group, but don’t
say to others
implicit unconscious mental associations guiding our
judgments and actions without our conscious awareness
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Implicit StereotypesUse of priming: subject doesn’t know
stereotype is being activated, can’t work to suppress it another study
flash pictures of Black vs. White faces subliminally give incomplete words like “hos_____,” subjects seeing Black
make “hostile,” seeing White make “hospital”
Assign: Go to my website and click on Implicit Social Attitudes
This will take you to the link you need to take the Harvard IAT.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/(or click this of you are online now )
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Implicit StereotypesDevine’s automaticity theory
stereotypes about African-Americans are so prevalent in our culture that we all hold them
these stereotypes are automatically activated whenever we come into contact with an African-American
we have to actively push them back down if we don’t wish to act in a prejudiced way.
Overcoming prejudice is possible, but takes work