Social Perception

Question 1

social perception

Answer 1

how we make sense of each other

Question 2

relationship between emotional expressions and social perception

Answer 2

facial expressions provide us a way to interact and understand each other -> provides window into what people are thinking and feeling

Question 3

universality of emotional expressions

Answer 3

• 6 universal facial expressions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise
• Contempt and pride may also be universally understood
• • Evidence: blind athletes display same prideful posture as sighted athletes after winning -> shows that this doesn’t require explicit learning

Question 4

the influence of thin slices of non-verbal behaviour

Answer 4

• convey a lot of info
• ex. “Who’s Your Mama?” video; undergrads can predict teacher effectiveness scores based on 6-second silent video clips
• shows importance of non-verbal cues -> without them, we lose our ability to accurately understand people (ex. email, texting)

Question 5

causal attribution

Answer 5

• how we make judgments about others’ personalities
• ex. Nervous Nat -> situational constraint manipulation (either anxiety-provoking topics or neutral ones) influence how we judge her personality

Question 6

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 6

• attributing behaviour to personality rather than situation
• can be culture-dependent (ex. Eastern cultures do this less -> pay more attn to social context)
• easier to make personality judgments and not take situation into account (ex. Nervous Nat), especially when we’re cognitively busy

Question 7

Recalling Responsibility in Groups Study (Ross & Sicoly): what did they do?

Answer 7

conducted experiments (ie. married couple survey, group task recollection, basketball team recollection) to assess biases in memory and attribution of responsibility of decisions that happened in a group interaction

Question 8

Recalling Responsibility in Groups Study (Ross & Sicoly): what did they find?

Answer 8

• consistently found evidence for egocentric biases in availability & attribution
• Recall was more accurate if group performed negatively
• If another participant’s contributions were made easier to recall, people allotted responsibility accordingly
• egocentric biases can occur at a group level

Question 9

Recalling Responsibility in Groups Study (Ross & Sicoly): why did they find what they found?

Answer 9

• your own contributions are more salient and available to you (therefore easier to remember), creating an egocentric bias
• because of this, people accepted more responsibility for group decisions than other group members gave them

Question 10

Email Study (Kruger et al): What did they find?

Answer 10

• despite the fact that it’s hard to convey emotion over email, people believe they can communicate more effectively over email than they actually can
• this happens with strangers and friends
• voice and intonation are what’s really important for communication (ie. doesn’t have to be face-to-face)

Question 11

Email Study (Kruger et al): What did they do?

Answer 11

conducted various studies where people had to write statements which would be read by another participant -> predicted reviewer’s accuracy

Question 12

Email Study (Kruger et al): Why did they find what they did?

Answer 12

• email overconfidence is due to egocentrism
• when you’re the email writer, you ‘hear’ the email differently based on your intentions, but the recipient may not ‘hear’ it the same way

Question 13

Spotlight effect study (Gilovich): what did they do?

Answer 13

put people in situations where they had to estimate how many people would notice/remember something about them (ie. cool or embarrassing shirt, group participation, etc.)

Question 14

Spotlight effect study (Gilovich): what did they find?

Answer 14

• people overestimated how much their actions and appearance were noticed by others -> “spotlight effect”
• if there’s a delay between the thing people are supposed to notice (ie. from the time you put on a t-shirt to when you walk into the room), you’ll overestimate less
• anchoring-and-adjustment occurs (people anchored their guess on their own experience and then adjusted down, but it was insufficient)
• routines dampen or reverse spotlight effect (ex. smokers)

Question 15

Spotlight effect study (Gilovich): why did they find what they did?

Answer 15

egocentric bias: people believe our actions and appearance (both good and bad) are more salient to others than they truly are

Question 16

phenomenons related to spotlight effect

Answer 16

• Naïve realism: assuming that your perception of a thing/event is accurate and objective rather than subjective
• Self-as-target bias: sense that actions/events are disproportionately directed towards the self (ie. -
  Teacher calling on you the one time you don’t know the answer)
• Illusion of transparency: when people feel like their own internal experiences/states are “leaking out” and visible for all to see