Chapter 4

Perceiving Persons

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– We’re both perceiver and target

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.– Why? Explain the explanation.

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?– 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.

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 and ….

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 somewhat

harder to control.

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– Perceivers tune in to the wrong channels

Attribution Theories

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

• Attribution theories describe how people explain the causes of behavior

• Heider: Explanations can be grouped into two categories:– Personal Attributions (Internal disposition)– Situational Attributions (External)

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

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?

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

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

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.

• Wishful seeing. See what we _____.• Just-world belief.

Priming Effects

• Priming: 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.

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.

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

• Change of Meaning Hypothesis & Confirmation Bias– 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.

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

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.

• Certain social perception skills can be improved by being taught rules of probability and logic.

• We can form more accurate impressions of others when we are motivated.