perceiving others Flashcards
the raw material of social perception
- Physical appearance
- Behaviour
- Situational factors
– (e.g. where you live, your friends, your job)
- Communications from other people
- Communications from the person themselves
- [Ichhesier, 1949]
typology of personality misinterpretation
. The tendency to overestimate the unity of personality
- Success and failure as sources of misinterpretations
- Stereotyped classifications as sources ofmisinterpretations
- Limits of insight as sources of misinterpretation
- Mechanisms of rigidity
- The tendency to overestimate the role of personal andto underestimate the role of situational factors
- (Ichheiser, 1949)
primacy effects of Asch’s study
- Asch (1946), Experiment 6
- Lists of traits of two individuals:
- Target A: intelligent—industrious— impulsive—critical—stubborn—envious
- Target B: envious—stubborn—critical— impulsive—industrious—intelligent
primacy effects following on aschs study
A: “The person is intelligent and fortunately he puts his intelligence to work. That he is stubborn and impulsive may be due to the fact that he knows what he is saying and what he means and will not therefore give in easily to someone else’s idea which he disagrees with.”
asch’s study on central traits
- Asch [1946], experiment 1
- Lists of traits of two individuals:
- Target A: intelligent—skillful—industrious—warm—determined—practical—cautious
- Target B: intelligent—skillful—industrious—cold—determined—practical—cautious
common stereotypes
[low compentence,high warmth] = elderly, people with disabilities
[low compentence, low warmth] = poor, homeless people
[high compentence, high warmth]= citzens, middle class, majority group
[high compentence, low warmth]= rich people, professionals, technical experts
[persistent stereotypes in the US, adapted from Fiske, 2018]
attribution theory
- Heider (1958) idea of “naïve psychology”
- Attribution theory is concerned with how people
make causal explanations for their own and
others’ behaviour (Kelley, 1973). - “attempts of ordinary people to understand thecauses and implications of the events they witness”(Ross, 1977, p.174)
- Focused on how we as social perceivers useinformation to arrive at these causal explanations
types of attribution
- Dispositional vs. situational attributions
- “Jack was feeling nervous because he has an anxious personality” = dispositional attribution
- “Jill was feeling nervous because she was going to the dentist” = situational attribution
- Actually, it’s a bit more complicated! According to Weiner (1985), attributions can be:
- Internal or external
- Stable or unstable
- Controllable or uncontrollable
concerespondent interference theory
Concerned with the conditions under which people will make dispositional attributions of others’ behaviour (Jones & Davis, 1965)
- choice
- social desirability
- social roles
example study; jones and Harris and the attitude attribution paradigm
- Participants (N = 41) read essays on Castro’s Cuba.
- Informed that a student had written the essay inresponse to the following instructions:
- either (a) “Based on the past week’s discussion and lectures,write a short cogent criticism of Castro’s Cuba as if you weregiving the opening statement in a debate”
- or (b) “…short cogent defence of Castro’s Cuba as if…”
- or (c) “…. short cogent essay either defending or criticizingCastro’s Cuba as if …”.
- 200-word pro-Castro or anti-Castro essay
- Asked to judge characteristics of author and estimatetheir true attitude towards Castro
cognitive load
- Gilbert and Malone (1995) suggest attribution processes happen in two stages:
- Dispositional inference (automatic and instant)
- Situational correction (takes effort and attention)
- Increases in cognitive load (e.g. via distraction
- tasks) can undermine situational correction
- Cognitive load increases dispositional inference
not so fundamental…
- More situational inferences among
- Liberals vs. conservatives(Skitka et al., 2002)
- Asian vs. North American participants (Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994)
- Possible explanations
- Different automatic inferences
- Motivated correction
- Holistic thinking
- Group-agency beliefs
self-fulfilling prophecies
- “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come ‘true’.
- This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning”
(Merton, 1968, p. 477)
Pygmalion in the classroom
- Notorious study (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968)
- Told primary teachers some students would be “growth spurters” in scholastic achievement
- Fake “Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition”
- Actually randomly assigned
- Children labelled as “growth spurters” showed significant gains in IQ compared to peers
- Strongest effects in youngest age groups
Behavioural confirmation
- Experimental study of self-fulfilling prophecies
- Male students (N = 108) in groups of three
- (1) labelling perceiver, (2) target, (3) naïve perceiver
- Target labelled as “hostile” vs. “non-hostile”
- based on fake survey of labelling perceiver and target
- additional attribution manipulation … (2x2 design)
- Behavioural measure of hostility
- ‘noise weapon’ in reaction time task
- labelling perceiver records impression of target
- Attribution manipulation:
- disposition attribution (use of the noise weapon reflects their ‘own personal characteristics’)
- situation attribution (use of the noise weapon reflects the way their opponent treats them)
- Second reaction time task with naïve perceiver
- use of noise weapon recorded
- naïve perceiver records impression of target
