Ch. 4 - Perceiving Persons Flashcards
Social perception
The process by which people come to understand each other
based on:
- Evidence
- Attributions
- Integration
- how our impressions dictate our reality (confirmation biases)
Behavioural Scripts
Specific contexts where things are expected or not
Behavioural Evidence
- People are good at identifying actions based on Movement
- Mind Perception
- Nonverbal Behaviour
Mind Perception
The attribution of Human-Like mental states and capacities to animate and inanimate things, including humans
Based on two Dimensions
- Agency (ability to plan and execute behaviour)
- Experience (Ability to feel and sense)
* Participants rated various human and non-human objects’ on the extent of their mental abilities and how much they liked/valued/wanted to protect it
Agency
Perceived ability to plan and execute behaviour
Experience
Perceived ability to feel and sense (physical and mental)
Nonverbal Behaviour
Facial, vocal, and bodily behaviour that shows feelings
- mostly universal, but can be culturally variable (e.g. hungarian head-shakes)
- accurately judged by most people for things like IQ, personality, and disorders
Eye Contact
most important of nonverbal behaviours
- humans are incredibly sensitive to eye contact
- can show positive and negative things, depending on context
Best ways to find truth and deception
Make sure they’re cognitively taxed while questioning them
- Still difficult to accurately see most of the time
Attribution theory
We come up with attributions to explain behaviours
focus on intent (unintentional or intentional) and whether or not it reflects beliefs, personality or mental state
Attributions
explanations for peoples’ actions
The two types of Causal attributions
Personal Attributions
Situational attributions
Personal Attributions
Attributions based on an individual’s internal qualities like mood, personality, ability
Situational Attributions
Attributions based on external events, like a task, other people, or luck
Correspondence theory
How we try to see someone’s actions in relation to their traits
Factors:
- Degree of Choice
- Degree of Expectedness
- Intended Effects
how does the Degree of Choice show someone’s traits
Freely chosen behaviour is more informative than coerced
how does the Degree of Expectedness show someone’s traits
How much of a departure from the social norm is this?
How do Intended Effects show someone’s traits
What does one expect to achieve through their behaviours?
- acts that produce many desirable outcomes are less telling than those that produce few
Covariation Principle
In order for something to be the cause of a behaviour, it must be present when the behaviour occurs and absent when it doesn’t
Covariation theory
Covariation Theory
+ 3 types of covariation:
- Consensus
- Distinctiveness
- Consistency
Consensus Covariation
How much someone is affected by other peoples’ opinions
- high consensus = more effected by others’ opinions
Distinctiveness covariation
How someone’s overall opinions about other things effect their views
- high distinctiveness is when one is critical of other things and appreciates uniqueness
Consistency covariation
How someone’s opinion is affected by context and holds up over time
- high in consistency is when someone likes something all of the time
System 1 thought
Quick, easy, and automatic thought
- like intuition
System 2 thought
More careful thought that takes longer and is more cognitively taxing
- more reasoned
Availability Heuristic
Tendency to estimate odds of an event in reference to how easily one can think of it happening
- sorta causes the False Consensus Effect
False consensus effect
the tendency to overestimate how much others share the same beliefs
- caused by the availability heuristic (it’s easier to think of people following your own path of logic)
Base Rate Fallacy
People are less effected by basic probability than by graphic imagery
- One will still be afraid of plane crashes because they’re gruesome and shocking, even though they are highly unlikely
Counterfactual thinking
how people’s emotions are impacted by what COULD HAVE HAPPENED, rather than what did
- mostly regrets
- also can affect how people define their biggest influences
* bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists because their obvious alternative is worse
Fundamental Attribution Error
Tendency to overestimate personal factors and underestimate the role of situational factors
- e.g. more likely to act on implicit bias when cognitive resources are drained
* trivia show study (people think the hosts are smart, even when they don’t write the questions)
Two step model of Attribution
First step: automatic, immediate, usually personal
Second step: Requires conscious thought, less common
Relational Mobility
How much freedom and opportunity a society provides to form new ties and break old ones based on personal preference
Cultural effects on attribution
- Fundamental attribution error is actually more common in collectivist societies
- relational mobility
- religious beliefs
- The effects of folk theories on human causality (thieves can’t read)
- Individualists and collectivists are equally likely to notice focal figures, but individualists are less likely to notice details about the background
Motivational Biases
- Wishful Seeing
- Need for self esteem bias
- belief in a just world
Wishful Seeing
people see what they want to see
* people were more likely to see B or 13 if they were told they’d get orange juice for seeing a letter or number respectively
Need for Self Esteem Bias
- Self Favouring Attributions are extremely common
- people take more credit for Success than for failure
- Illusion of Objectivity in one’s own perceptions and reasoning
Illusion of objectivity
People typically believe that their own perceptions, opinions and values are correct, leading us to assume that anyone who disagrees is wrong
Belief in a Just World
People are more likely to think that everyone gets what they deserve, since that protects them from the possibility of bad luck
- acts as a buffer against stress
Information Integration Theory
Impressions formed of others are based on a combination of:
- Personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver
- a weighted average of the target person’s characteristics
Perceiver Characteristics in impression formation
people use themselves as a standard/frame of reference when forming impressions
- perceiver mood is also important
Priming
the tendency for frequently or recently used concepts to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new info
- works best when we’re not aware
* after reading positive or negative trait words, people were more likely to associate others with those traits
5 Main Traits everyone is on a scale of
- Extroversion
- emotional stability
- openness to experience
- agreeableness
- conscientiousness
Trait negativity bias
Negative traits are generally weighed more heavily in making impressions than positive ones
* people are faster to detect negative subliminal words than positive ones
Innuendo effect
negative information is inherently implied by omissions
- if someone is said to be high in warmth, we assume they are low in competence
Contextual factors of impression formation
- association with other people (are the other people attractive? well liked by the perceiver?)
- implicit theories of personality
- the order in which we hear the traits
Central traits
Imply the existence of other traits and have a stronger influence on final impressions
- Warmth is a very central trait
Primacy effect
we tend to weigh earlier learned things as more important
* people taking a test doing badly or well at first, those who did well at first were seen as more intelligent, and the
updating the primacy effect
we tend not to unless the information is:
- extremely believable
- extremely negative and diagnostic of someone’s moral character
Morality
More important than warmth
examples:
- courageous, fair, principled, just, honest, trustworthy, and loyal
Confirmation bias
one’s tendency to look for details that confirm their beliefs and overlook ones that don’t
Belief Perseverence
we tend to retain our initial beliefs even in spite of contrary new information
- can be reduced by asking people to consider why an alternative theory might be true
Self Fulfilling Prophecy
How a perceiver’s expectation can often lead to its own fulfillment
*Late bloomers study (teachers told students were on the verge of an academic growth spurt)
- massive role in social anxiety and other insecurities
Implicit egotism
we like people who remind us of ourselves, and things we see in ourselves
the IKEA effect
things that we make ourselves come to be seen as a symbol of our competence, which makes us like them more
