Chapter 4 - Social Perception

Question 1

Social Perception

Answer 1

The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.

Question 2

Explain how people use nonverbal cues to understand others

Answer 2

The way in which people communicate intentionally or unintentionally, without words, including via facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position, movement, touch and gaze

Question 3

Evolution of facial expressions

Answer 3

Darwin believed that nonverbal forms of communication were species not culture specific.

• Fear face enhances perception while disgust face decreases it.
• More quickly able to detect angry faces than happy faces

Question 4

• 6 universal facial expressions across cultures -

Answer 4

Anger/fear/happiness/surprise/sadness/disgust

Pride may also be universal.

Question 5

Encode

Answer 5

To express or emit nonverbal behaviour, such as smiling or patting someone on the back

Question 6

Decode

Answer 6

To interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behaviour other people express. such as deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness.

Question 7

Why is decoding sometimes difficult?

Answer 7

Affect Blends – One part of the face registers one emotion while another part registers a different emotion.

Question 8

What channels of nonverbal communication can be affected by culture

Answer 8

Display Rules – Culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviours are appropriate to display:

• Eye contact and Gaze – Particularlary powerful channels of nonverbal communication – shaped by culture
• Personal space + touching - perception of normal bubble of space varies between culture – acts as a form of nonverbal communication
• Gestures – eg. Thumbs up, peace, ok

Question 9

What is an emblem?

Answer 9

Nonverbal gestures that have well understood definitions within a given culture, usually having direct verbal translations such as the OK sign.
- Emblems are not universal

Question 10

First impressions form quickly and persist - what 3 processes may be involved?

Answer 10

• Thin slicing
• Primacy effect
• Belief perserverance

Question 11

What is thin slicing?

Answer 11

Drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills, based on an extremely brief sample of behaviour

Question 12

What is the primacy effect?

Answer 12

When it comes to forming impressions , the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information that we learn about them later.

Question 13

How did Asch (1946) demonstrate the primacy effect?

Answer 13

Keith/Kevin experiment - Used the same words in a different order to describe 2 hypothetical people which resulted in very different perceptions being created by participants.
List 1: Intelligent skilful industrious warm determined
practical cautious
•
List 2: Intelligent skilful industrious cold determined
practical cautious
The use of warm/cold primed participants to attribute particular characteristics. First/last word order also made a difference. IE. words read first and last had more of an effect than words in the middle

Question 14

What is belief perseverance?

Answer 14

The tendency to stick with an initial judgement even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider (eg. Thinking Obama was a muslim long after that was debunked). Once we make up our minds we’re inclined to keep thme made up.

Question 15

Explain impression management

Answer 15

Motivation to make a good first impression

Question 16

What is causal attribution?

Answer 16

How we determine WHY other people do what they do.

Question 17

Explain attribution theory

Answer 17

– a study of how we infer the causes of other people’s behaviour (and our own).

Question 18

Who is a key figure in attribution theory?

Answer 18

Fritz Heider (1958) is key figure in attribution theory. He discussed ‘naïve’ or ‘commonsense’ psychology. – People were like amateur scientists.

Question 19

Internal attribution

Answer 19

The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person such as attitude, character, or personality.

Question 20

External attribution

Answer 20

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in, with the assumption that most people would respond the same way in that situation.

Question 21

What is an indicator of relationship satisfaction?

Answer 21

Whether you attribute behaviours to internal or external elements in an intimate relationship, external elements = more satisfaction

Question 22

Explain the covariation model and who developed the theory?

Answer 22

Covariation Model: Internal versus external attributions (Kelley 1967, 1973)

• Theory that to form an attribution about what caused a person’s behaviour, we note the pattern between when the behaviour occurs and the presence or absence of possible causal factors. (ie will use multiple behaviours from different times and situations to form an attribution).
• How a persons behaviour ‘covaries’ or changes across time and place.

Question 23

What are the 3 types of covariation information used to form an attribution? (Kelley 1967).

Answer 23

• Consensus
• Distinctiveness
• Consistency

To decide whether a behavior was caused by internal (dispositional) factors or by external (situational) factors, people use consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information.

Question 24

Explain consensus

Answer 24

The extent to which other people behave the same way towards the same stimulus as the actor (the target of the attributional efforts) does. Eg. Boss yelling at Hannah, why? consensus high - everyone yells at Hannah

Question 25

Explain distinctiveness

Answer 25

Distinctiveness information – The extent to which a particular actor behaves in the same way toward different stimuli. (How a person responds to other stimuli). Eg. Is Hannah the only person the boss criticizes publicly?
Distinctiveness high - your boss only yells at Hannah

Question 26

Explain Consistency

Answer 26

The extent to which the behaviour between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances. (Refers to frequency with which the observed behaviour between the same person and same stimulus occurs across time and circumstances.) Does boss criticise Hanna frequently, even if store is filled with customers? Morning and evening?

• consistency high - your boss always yells at Hannah
• Difficult to make a straightforward attribution when consistency is low. – end up chalking it up to a special external/situational factor.

Question 27

What is the fundamental attribution error?

and the actor observer effect?

Answer 27

1. The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people’s behaviour results from internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors. (to not take situational information into account when attributing causes of others’ behaviour
2. Tend to make external attributions for our own behaviour and internal attributions for others behaviour. (Nisbett 1973)

Question 28

Difference between social v personality psych in attribution?

Answer 28

Personality psychology likely to attribute it to internal factors, social psych more likely to attribute to external factors.

Question 29

What did Jones + Harris (1967) research?

Answer 29

Castro essay study and attribution. Told students either had no choice or a choice in writing pro-castro essay - Subjects reading the pro-Castro essay in the no-choice condition discounted the essay a bit, but not fully.

Question 30

Explain perceptual salience

Answer 30

The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention. (because the whole /situational factors may not be visible to us). People have perceptual salience for us because we can see and observe directly, we cannot always observe the whole situation. We pay attention to people and assume that they alone cause their behaviour.

Question 31

Explain study by Taylor and Fiske (1975) in relation to perceptual salience.

Answer 31

the actor they could see had more impact on the conversation – see image pg.103

Question 32

Explain the two step attribution process

Answer 32

Analysing another person’s behaviour first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behaviour.

Question 33

What is a self-serving attribution?

Answer 33

Explanations for one’s successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and blame external, situational factors for one’s failures.
- external attribution protects our self-esteem

Question 34

What is ‘belief in a just world’

Answer 34

A defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people.
- belief in a just world can keep anxiety provoking thoughts about one’s own safety at bay. Consider hypothetical of female student raped on campus – people may wonder if she’d done something to trigger the attack, place some blame onto the victim to try and make themselves feel better about the disturbing attack

Question 35

Bias blind spot?

Answer 35

The tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are

Question 36

Describe how culture influences our processes of social perception and attribution

Answer 36

North American and some other western cultures stress individual autonomy. A person is perceived as independent and self-contained; their behaviour reflects internal traits, motives and values. Can be traced back to Judeo-christian belief in the individual soul and the English legal tradition of individual rights.
East Asian culture eg. China, japan, korea tend to stress group autonomy. Individual derives sense of self from the group This comes from Confucian tradition eg. “community man” or “social being” as well as from Taoism, buddhism

Question 37

Holistic v analytic thinking

Answer 37

Western cultures develop more of an analytic thinking style. This involves focusing more on the properties of objects and less attention to the context or the situation.

Collectivist cultures develop more of a holistic thinking style or “whole picture” which includes the object (or person) and the context as well as the relationships that exist between them.

Question 38

What is Masuda et al. (2008) study about

Answer 38

emotion in central person v group

Question 39

Describe some cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error

Answer 39

People from individualist cultures prefer internal/dispositional attributions about others, relative to people in collectivist cultures, who prefer situational attributions.
People in collectivist cultures more likely to go beyond dispositional explanations and consider situation as well (like social psychologists), those in the west think more like personality psychologists.

Question 40

What did Miller (1984) show?

Answer 40

shows that environmental factors (cultural experiences) play a major role in social perceptions processes, in context of role of evolution.

Question 41

Culture differences in self-serving bias

Answer 41

self-serving bias - Strongest in the US and some other western countries – aus, Canada NZ. In collectivist cultures more likely to attribute success to other people – teachers, parents, or aspets of situation eg. High quality school. Reflecting values of culture – eg. Modesty and harmony.

Question 42

Describe Snyder, Tanke, Berscheid (1977) study on impression formation?

Answer 42

*Phone conversations between men and women.
* Men were shown a profile image of an attractive v less attractive woman, who they later spoke to over the phone.
Findings
* Men behaved in a more sociable manner (e.g., more friendly) when they spoke to the attractive woman. (this led women to behave more sociable too).

Question 43

Describe Rosenthal (1973) study

Answer 43

‘on being sane in insane places’ Sane people went to psychiatric hospitals by stating they heard voices saying ‘empty’, ‘thud’ = existential psychosis. Acting as normally as possible once admitted. SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY, took between 7-52 days to be released.

Question 44

Implicit Personality Theory - who was prominent figure in this theory?

Answer 44

Ideas about what personality traits go together

• Fiske (2007, 2018)
• Warmth and competence as central traits with evolutionary significance.
• warmth associated with percieved intent (eg. friendliness, helpfulness, trustworthiness, morality)
• Competence - perceived ability (eg. intelligence, skill, creativity, efficacy).

Question 45

What did Vrij (2004) study?

Answer 45

How accurate are humans in detecting lies? Found that when people are lying - less blinking, more pauses in speech, more agitation.

• Police 65% accurate at lie detection.
• lying found to be an individual act

Question 46

Rosenthal (1968)

Answer 46

‘pygmalion in the classroom” teacher expectation and pupils intellectual development. Randomly allocated a number of children to be ‘bloomers’, - performed better on objective measures of intelligence. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

Question 47

Dimberg et al. (2000)

Answer 47

Electromyography - monitored facial muscles. Angry, neutral, happy face shown for 30ms, then masked by neutral face for 5s.
we subconsciously mirror these expressions as observed through measuring muscle reacitivity.

Question 48

Becker et al. (2007) - angry faces experiment

Answer 48

Greater correlation between males and anger, females and happiness. Suggests a bottom up process driven by features of male/female faces.

Question 49

Describe aspects of Weiner’s (1985, 1995) causal dimensions in attributions for success or failure

Answer 49

Is behaviour due to:
Locus of control: Internal v External (person v situation)

Stability: Stable v unstable (likely to remain same over time or will it change?

Controllability: controllable v uncontrollable. (is it something people have control over or is it something we couldn’t change even if we wanted to?

Question 50

Describe Schmidt & Weiner (1988) study on causal attributions on provision of help.

Answer 50

Students were more likely to help another student who missed a class becuase of an eye treatment than if they went to the beach (because the first is uncontrollable, internal and stable and the second is controllable).

Question 51

Global v specific attributions (pervasiveness)

Answer 51

Kelley (1972)
A global attribution occurs when an individual attributes an outcome to a factor they perceive to be consistent, irrespective of context.

A specific attribution occurs when an individual attributes an outcome to a factor only relevant in the specific context or setting of the experience.

Question 52

Pessimistic attributional style

Answer 52

When people develop a
characteristic way of attributing negative outcomes to causes
that are:
• Internal to the self, stable, global.

Question 53

Seligman + Beagley (1975)

Answer 53

Looked at learned helpless and optimism.
Learned helplessness- Can learn to be helpless by perceiving negative events as beyond own control, and thus not changeable

Hopelessness(links with hopelessness depression)
• Characteristic way of attributing negative outcomes to causes:
1. Stable
2. Global

A pessimistic explanatory style is characterized by explanations of the causes of negative outcomes as being stable, global, and internal, and the causes of positive outcomes as being unstable, specific and external in nature.

Conversely, optimistic explanatory styles are characterized by explanations for negative outcomes as being due to unstable, specific and external causes, while positive outcomes are perceived as due to stable, global and internal causes.

Question 54

Ohman (2001) - Responding to emotional faces - describe

Answer 54

Participants indicate whether all faces have same emotional expression, and this is done in neutral arrays, or emotional arrays.
Angry faces more quickly and accurately detected than happy faces in crowds of neutral or emotional faces.

Question 55

How well does pessissm correlate with depression in children?

Answer 55

Pessimism correlates .50 with depression in children (28 studies,Gladstone & Klaslow, 1995)