Social Perception, Self-Knowledge, and Conformity Flashcards
If we get someone to do a favor for us, how will they feel about us after performing the favor?
The participants asked to do the favor specifically for the experimenter liked him the most over all the other conditions. They convinced themselves the experimenter was a good person, and that was why they decided to give the money upon request.
- this is called the Benjamin Franklin Effect
- doing a favor for someone makes you like them better
Is social cognition motivated more by the desire to be accurate or to be liked?
Social cognition is motivated largely by the desire to be accurate in our judgments.
Ben Franklin Effect
The Benjamin Franklin effect refers to the sensation of liking another person more after doing a favor (or agree to do a favor) for them. When we do a favor for someone else, we like that person more.
Naïve realism
The human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.
How do we perceive other people?
To form impressions of and make inferences about other people, we use 3 general types of info:
Nonverbal communication
Verbal Communication
Physical appearance
How do physical characteristics of others affect our evaluation of them?
If a person is beautiful, we apply the schema “that beautiful is good.” If they are not beautiful, we assume less of their character or traits. In general, physical characteristics can activate certain biases and schemas.
How do nonverbal cues affect our evaluations of others?
Nonverbal cues relay the following info:
Express emotion
Convey attitudes
Communicate personality traits
Facilitate/modify verbal communication
These affect our evaluations of others by redirecting where we should focus our attention and by giving us meaningful context about someone’s behavior.
How do the words people use shape our perception of them?
Different words can relay info about personality, traits, and etc. Pronouns and word choice can convey how depressed or happy they might be, if they are honest or not, if they are precise, if they are goal-oriented, and status.
- Words > 6 letters = education, social class
- First person singular pronouns (I, me, mine) = depressed, honest, low social class
- First person plural pronouns (We, us, our) = detached, high status, socially connected to group
- Future tense = goal orientation
- Prepositions = concern with precision
- Negations = inhibition
- Swear words = aggression, informality
- Exclusive (but, without, exclude) = cognitive complexity, honesty
How accurate are our perceptions of other people?
When schemas are applied to people, they are called stereotypes. Generally-speaking, stereotypes are inaccurate depictions/understandings of another person. Like all schemas, while some info gleaned from stereotypes can be correct, it can also be misguided and too narrow an interpretation.
- When someone is close to us, we can guess w/ .27 accuracy
- When someone is an acquaintance, we can guess w/ .05 accuracy
- Or: we do not know others particularly well
What schemas do we use in social perception?
Stereotypes.
The Halo Effect
A type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about his or her character. Essentially, your overall impression of a person (“He is nice!”) impacts your evaluations of that person’s specific traits (“He is also smart!”).
How much do first impressions really matter?
They are often wrong and have low validity, but they are also long-lasting and can have a dramatic effect on how we are treated by others.
How have social psychologists studied the importance (or unimportance?) of first impressions?
In one study, when participants watched a person take an oral exam, they were more likely to rate the test-taker as smart if they started out well as opposed to started out poorly. The first impression of seeming intelligent caused them to evaluate the individual better even though the test-taker got the same amount wrong in both conditions.
- American participants rated the faces of Canadian political candidates and their first impression ratings correlated with election results. The more powerful a candidate looked, the more likely they were to have won their election and the warmer they looked the less likely they were to have won.
- Students rated a professor on just a 10 second silent video clip of them teaching and their ratings correlated to the end of the year evaluations of student who took the professor’s’ course.
When do we make internal vs. external attributions?
Internal attribution – when there is high consensus, high distinctiveness, and high consistency (according to Kelley’s covariation model).
External attribution – when there is low consensus, low distinctiveness, and high consistency (according to Kelley’s covariation model).
What kinds of information do we use in deciding whether someone’s behavior was due to internal vs. external factors?
Consensus: whether others behave in the same way as our actor did.
Distinctiveness: whether the same actor behaves in same way given different stimuli/situations.
Consistency: whether the behavior b/w our actor and the same stimuli/situation is the same across time and contexts.
Kelley’s Covariation Model
- Examination of multiple behaviors from different times and situations to form an attribution about what caused a person’s behavior.
- How people decide to make internal vs. external attributions.
1. Uses consistency (the frequency with which the observed behavior between the same actor and same stimulus occurs across time and circumstances)
2. Consensus (how other people behave toward the same stimulus)
3. Distinctiveness (how the persons whose behavior we are trying to explain responds to other stimuli)
Why do we commit the fundamental attribution error?
We commit the fundamental attribution error b/c of actor-observer effects. Actors notice the situation around them and how they are affected by the situation, but observers do not.
What study demonstrated the actor-observer affect?
One study showed this when two assistants faced each other for a conversation, and participants—two observers on each side of the assistants—watched them.
Observers made more attributions to the dispositions of the conversationalist they were facing (e.g., “he didn’t talk b/c he is shy”)
Conversationalists made many more situational attributions about themselves (e.g., “I didn’t talk much b/c I was nervous about the camera”)
What are self-serving biases?
The tendency to perceive ourselves as competent, morally good, innocent, deserving, and worthy.
Who is prone to using self-serving biases?
People with high or normal self-esteem.
Who is less likely to exhibit self-serving biases?
People who are depressed, anxious, or have low self-esteem and thus little reason to perceive themselves positively.
Why do people often blame victims?
They blame victims b/c of defensive attributions, which is a type of self-serving attributional bias that assumes that good things happen to good people. If bad things happen to good people, it creates a psychological tension.
This results in internal attributions for people who experience negative outcomes, or blaming the victim.
What is Self-handicapping?
An attempt to literally create an external attribution that can explain our failures. This is specifically doing some act in advance that could sabotage an outcome and thus provide an explanation for why we failed.
- “to hinder your own performance in advance of a competition or test”
- If someone does poorly, circumstances can be blamed instead
- If they do well in spite of the handicap, they earn bonus points in self-esteem (e.g., “she must be really smart, she stayed out all night and still aced the exam!”)
What is the bias blindspot?
The tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than you are.
What are defensive attributions?
Explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality.
How do we know things about ourselves?
We know ourselves based on the content of our self-concept, which is organized into many self-schemas.
What are self-schemas?
Mental structures that people use to organize their knowledge about themselves and what influences they noticed, think about, and remember about themselves.
How accurate are we in knowing ourselves?
We generally know ourselves the best in comparison to others, but we still make mistaken inferences and misunderstand our behaviors.
- We are not good at explaining our own behaviors, b/c we can often be aware of the result of our thinking process w/o being aware of the process itself
- Introspection is sometimes inaccurate, b/c we do not rely on it as much as we assume, and even if we do introspect, the actual reasons for our behaviors can still be hidden from conscious awareness
What is introspection?
The process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings, and motives.
What is self-awareness theory?
The idea that people focus their attention on themselves and evaluate and compare their behaviors to their own internal standards/expectations.
How is self-focus adaptive?
Self-focus can manifest either positively or negatively depending on context:
- Spirituality
- Religious expression
- Reminding you of your sense of right and wrong
- Reminding you of your shortcomings or failures
- Reminding you of your successes
What is reasons-generated attitude change?
Attitude change resulting from thinking about the reasons for one’s attitudes; people assume that their attitudes match the reasons that are plausible and easy to verbalize.
What is self-knowledge?
Knowledge or understanding of one’s own capabilities, character, feelings, or motivations.
Are other people more accurate in their knowledge of our attitudes, behaviors, and personalities than we are?
No, they do only as well or are typically worse at assessing our attitudes, behaviors, and personalities. Accuracy of their knowledge about our own sense of self is only about .27.
Who tends to predict our attitudes, behaviors, and personalities best? Ourselves OR our friends, siblings, parents, romantic partners, or random strangers in the laboratory? How might this vary across domains?
- Others – compare us at .27% accuracy if they are close to us.
- Ourselves – understand ourselves at .27% accuracy.
- Strangers – only a 0.05% accuracy when assessing other’s behaviors.
We are most able to predict our attitudes, behaviors, and personalities. However, others (and strangers) can sometimes better assess our behavior in areas that we do not regularly think about, like how quiet we are or etc. In general, they can be have greater accuracy on external behavior than we do.
How do social and personality psychologists study how accurate we are in our self-knowledge?
Empirical experimentation that follows the self-perception theory (e.g., assesses our behavior based on physiological and mental reactions), social comparison theory (e.g., assesses our behavior based on the upward and downward comparisons that we make to judge ourselves against others), and the two-factory theory of emotion (e.g., that our behavior is inferred from our physiological responses in certain contexts).
How do social and personality psychologists study how accurate we are in our self-knowledge?
Empirical experimentation that follows the self-perception theory (e.g., assesses our behavior based on physiological and mental reactions), social comparison theory (e.g., assesses our behavior based on the upward and downward comparisons that we make to judge ourselves against others), and the two-factory theory of emotion (e.g., that our behavior is inferred from our physiological responses in certain contexts).
What is the self-concept?
A picture or mental understanding/image of who “you” are, or what schemas constitute your sense of self. This consists of:
Roles we play Social identities Comparisons w/ others Successes and failures How we are judged by others Culture we live in
What is the working self-concept?
The set of self-conceptions that we are aware of at any given point. The result of priming, motivation, and chronic versus temporary beliefs/actions/environments.
What is a “self”?
Self-knowledge: our beliefs about who we are and the way in which they formulate and organize information
Self-control: the way in which we make plans and execute decision
Impression management: how we present ourselves to other people
Self-esteem: way we feel about ourselves
How do we determine whether someone has self-recognition?
Using the mark test. Animals (or young humans) realize that the image in the mirror belongs to them after someone alters their appearance. They know that the alteration makes them look different from how they previously looked.
How do we develop our self-concepts? How do we define “who I am”?
We develop our self-concepts by drawing from the information around us and the experiences that impact us (and, by association, how we perceive ourselves). These include the following factors:
- Roles we play
- Social identities
- Comparisons we make w/ others
- Successes and failures
- How we are judged by others
- The culture we live in
How do we use other people as sources of information to learn about ourselves?
We evaluate our abilities and opinions in comparison to others through social comparison theory. We do these comparisons when objective standards are absent or uncertain, and we do not know how to best evaluate ourselves in response to some stimuli.
What is an upward social comparison?
Comparing ourselves to people who are better than we are in regard to a particular trait or ability.
