Person perception Flashcards
Role of information
We use information to make judgements and judge their importance
* Information has to be complete and accurate to help us make the best judgements
Inferences about strangers
Based on their faces we judge their trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability
Todorov et al. (2005) - Competence judgement
Snap judgements on competence based on faces were correct on who won position 69% of the time
Why shouldn’t you rely on first hand information
Relying on first hand information might not be representative and information from other people’s behaviour might not be reliable
Pluralistic ignorance
Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting differently from their beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences
Inter-racial communication and friendship formation
Failure to initiate contact was attributed to fear of rejection but it was assumed that the other person didn’t initiate because of a lack of interest in establishing friendship over ethnic lines
Self fulfilling prophecies (Rosenthal & Jacobsen, 1968)
Students described as bloomers achieved better results than non bloomers due to expectations brought to the perceptions by the perceiver
What is second hand information
Information that other people tell us
What is first hand information
Information that we experience ourselves
Flaws to second hand information
It could be misleading, persuasive, for entertainment or profit making
Sheley & Askins (1981) - Media perceptions of crime
80% of media presented crime is violent but in reality it’s only 20%
Why is negative info more powerful
Can be more informative and directly affects us
Negativity bias
Negative information tends to attract more attention and have greater psychological impact than positive information
Implicational schemata
A person with a moral disposition is unlikely to behave in an immoral way
Negativity bias on impression formation
Negative behaviours are more influential on impression formation as they are more diagnostic than positive behaviours
Asymmetry of trust
Trust is hard to gain but easy to lose
Order effects
Certain words can change how we perceive other words as our cognitive system searches for context as a whole
Order effects - Primary effect (Asch, 1946)
Participants can change their opinion of someone depending on what adjectives come first, if it’s positive then they’ll view them as positive
Framing effects
People’s opinion of certain things depends on how they are told them
* 25% lean vs 75% fat
Temporal framing
Actions may be thought at different levels of abstraction
Confirmation bias
We search for information confirming a proposition rather than for information contradicting a proposition
Dangers of confirmation bias
Can create information bubbles and politically polarised factions in society
* May be a function of greater availability of information thanks to the internet
Overconfidence (Koriat et al., 1980)
Have greater confidence in our own judgements than warranted by our accuracy
Top down processing
Meaning is actively construted
Top down processing - Effect on memory with car crash experiment (Loftus, 1975)
False memories evoked by linguistic variations of dynamic schema
Top down processing - Effect on memory with video tape experiment (Cohen, 1981)
Participants memories influenced by schemas about particular groups in society when recalling from tape
Effect on constructing bottom up info
Most accessible information in memory influences subsequent processing
* If participant reads words like confident or shy these words will influence how a participant rates a fake character
Heuristics
People are guided by a quick associative system rather than a slower more deliberate system
