Social Perception The ways in which people perceive on another.
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Transcript of Social Perception The ways in which people perceive on another.
Social PerceptionThe ways in which people perceive on
another
Making Sense of Others:
How you form your judgments
Primacy & Recency Effects
• Primacy Effect – Tendency to make an opinion on another person based on a first impression.– If 1st impression positive we’ll be more likely to get to
know them.
– We’ll interpret a person’s future behaviors more positively if their first impressions was a good one.
• Recency Effect – when people change their opinions of others based on recent interactions with them.
Person Perception*Mental processes we use to form judgments
and draw conclusions about the characteristics and motives of others
•This is an active & subjective process that occurs in a interpersonal context that has three components:
•The characteristics of the person you are sizing up
•Your own characteristics as a perceiver
•The specific situation the process occurs in
Social Categorization*• Mental process of classifying people into
groups on the basis of their shared characteristics.
• Much of it is automatic and spontaneous, and it often occurs outside conscious awareness
• Categories are usually broad: gender, race, age, occupation.
• Using social categories helps us mentally organize and remember info about others but may lead to inaccurate conclusions.
It ignores a person’s unique qualities and makes a conclusion on very limited information.
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
Attribution: Explaining the Causes
of Behavior
Attribution Theory
• We often explain behavior of others differently than we would our own behavior
• People tend to give a causal explanation for someone’s behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition or personality
Situational Disposition
• Attributing someone’s actions to the various factors in the situation
Dispositional Attribution
• Attributing someone’s actions to the person’s disposition, i.e. their thoughts, feelings, personality characteristics, etc.
Effects of Attributions
Attribution Can Lead to Errors
• Fundamental attribution error
• Actor-observer discrepancy
• Blaming the victim (just-world hypothesis)
• Self-serving bias
• Self-effacing bias
Fundamental Attribution Error
• Explains how we view OTHER’S behaviors• The tendency for observers, when analyzing
another’s behavior, to give too much weight to personality and not enough to situational variables
• People tend to blame or credit the person more than the situation.
• It is common in individualistic cultures
Using Attitudes as Ways to “Justify” Injustice
• Just-world bias*– a tendency to believe that life is fair, people get
what they deserve and deserve what they get
– 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 fault, – e.g., she deserved to be mugged, what was she doing
in that neighborhood anyway?
Actor-Observer Bias• Explains how we view our OWN behavior• Attribute personality causes of behavior when evaluating
someone else’s behavior• Attribute situational when evaluating our own behavior• We tend to judge a person on their actions we see whether these
are a true reflections of that person or not.• 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
– See the Active Psych Demo for more info on this.
Self-Serving Bias
• Tendency to take the credit for successful outcomes of one’s own behavior
• Unsuccessful outcomes blamed on external, situational causes beyond our control– Individualistic Cultures do this.
Self-Effacing Bias*
• Modesty bias - involves blaming failure on internal, personal factors, while attributing success to external, situational factors – Collectivist cultures do this.– Less likely to commit the fundamental
attribution error – More likely to attribute the causes of
another person’s behavior to external, situational factors rather than to internal, personal