Lecture 4: Social Perception Flashcards
Social Perception
Our minds are specialised for processing social info - we are people perceivers.
Most social perception is about the external appearance of others.
We combine info from social categories, traits and familiar individuals to form a social perception of others.
3 areas of social perception
1) Social categories
2) Trait perception
3) Familiar person perception
The Halo Effect
Nisbett (1977)
When something is conspicuous e.g. attractiveness it influences perception of other aspects of that person.
Perceiving social categories
Allows us to organise info and infer other attributes that you might not have access to.
E.g. Mixing someone up with another person - usually done when they share many categories - like mixing up one white, female, young singer with another.
Context and social categories
Kinzler et al (2010)
How and when categories used depends on what situation you are in e.g. Red Sox fan is a useful category in Boston but religious affiliation might be more useful in a religious community.
Social cognition is FLEXIBLE - able to prioritise categories depending on functional significance.
Language and Accent in social categorisation
Can be used as a cue to identify in-group / outgroup members.
Accent is used as an important cue for coalitional alliances.
Kinzler (2009)
French and American children. Preferred own accent children to choose as friends. Race was only used as a cue when no sound.
Supports Kurzban’s results that race is only used as proxy cue in absence of other cues. Also demonstrates interaction of evolved mechanisms and modern environments.
Shibboleths
Words used to identify out-group members e.g. the Dutch used a town name which German people couldn’t pronounce to identify Germans during the war.
Coalitional alliances
Humans use a variety of cues to infer coaltional alliance.
Verbal info
Accent
Clothing
Skin colour (as proxy cue)
Ambiguous coalitional alliance
An error management prob.
False negative may be more costly when info is ambiguous. Safer to assume someone is an out-group member as FNs can be esp costly in ambiguous situations.
Bi-racial indvs may be perceived as in-group or outgroup depending on threat level of situation.
Kinship and morality also fundamental categories (Lieberman et al, Leeuwen et al).
3 Main Categories
1) Race
2) Age
3) Gender
Race as a social category
From evo perspective, unlikely ancient humans would have travelled far enough to encounter people of a different race.
Skin colour used as a proxy cue to decide whether us or them quickly in inter-group conflict situations (Kurzban).
Kurzban et al (2000)
Memory Confusion Paradigm
Pps shown video clip of 2 sports teams interacting in a conversation - there were 2 players of each race on each team.
Analysis showed that people used team membership and primary categorisation cue. Race more of a proxy cue that an fundamental dimension.
Why categorise?
Allows you to infer additional attributes (stereotypes).
Consequences of categorisation
Have cognitive, social and affective consequences (Kinzler et al, 2010).
First step to prejudice.
Prejudice has been identified as first step towards genocide. Identifying and preventing this step may prevent genocide (Stanton, 1998).
- Bias perceptions of within-group / between group differences.
- Bias memory processes
- Bias decision making and reasoning.
- outgroup homogeneity => use of STs associated with the group.
Memory Confusion Paradigm (MCP)
Taylor et al (1978)
The “who said what” task.
Involves studying the errors people make when trying to remember one person from another.
a) Within category error = confusing like with like
b) Between category error = confusing members of different categories.
a - b = categorisation effect.
Categories can be cued by:
Utterance content, appearance, both.
Individuation
Ability to know the same person over time and space. E.g you know your child is your child even though their appearance changes over time.
Hood & Bloom (2008)
Teddy Cloning experiment.
May be an innate process.
Capgas syndrom
Irrational belief that someone you know has been replaced with a clone.
Seems to be a breakdown in the process of individuation. They see features but don’t build a holistic picture of the person.
Trait perception
When meeting people for the first time we quickly ascribe trait dimensions to them e.g. funny / dull, confident / timid.
Thin Slicing
Using limited information to make judgements about others. Have been shown to be as accurate as those decisions made over longer time and with more info.
Todorov et al (2005)
Thin Slicing study
Found voting preferences strongly influence by appearance of candidates. Those judged to look more competent were the ones voted in.
Could explain recent UK election results.
Ambady & Rosenthal (1993)
Thin slicing study
Pps shown short images or videos of lectures. Found that ratings given by pps that had only watched a 30s clip of a lecture correlated highly with those who had attended the entire course.
Relevance - shows that judgements are made very early on.
Other studies with salespeople and no sound and another able to determine sexuality better than chance after seeing a 50ms clip.
Relevance - judgements made quickly and accurately with v little info.
Accuracy in judging traits
Funder (2012)
“Personality traits are patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour that are relatively consistent over time and across situations”
Consequences for both the perceiver and the judged.
Accuracy must be judged against:
1) Self-other agreement
2) Other-other agreement
3) Behavioural prediction
Many studies use converging conclusions from all 3.
Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM)
1) relevant (to trait)
2) Available (to judge)
3) Detected
4) Utilised correctly
These 4 things don’t always happen together but they MUST in order for trait judgement to be accurate.
Summary x 3
Our impressions, attitudes and memories are dependent upon 3 things:
1) Categorising e.g. white, teenage, male
2) Perceiving traits e.g. neurotic, slightly geeky (based on initial impressions).
3) Perceiving familiar individuals e.g. Simon
Social categorisation definition
To categorise a person depending on a social group.
STs involve rigid thoughts and beliefs about these categories.
Kinship as a fundamental social category
Lieberman (2008)
MCP study.
Found that kinship was as much a fundamental category as race or sex.
Fundamental Social Categories
MCP studies have shown that the fundamental social categories are:
Sex, race, age and kinship.
Lieberman (2008) proposed kinship as an extra one.
Being able to quickly infer sex, age and kinship had evolutionary advantages:
Discourage incest,
encourage altrusim,
discourage certain forms of violence.
It is debatable whether race is a fundamental category as unlikely that we would have experienced other races and studies show that it is used as more of a proxy cue.
