Chapter Four: Social Perception
Chapter Four: Social Perception Culture & Nonverbal Communication • Paul Ekman concluded that display rules are particular to each culture & dictate what kind of emotional expression people are supposed to show • In collectivist cultures, the expression of strong negative emotions is discouraged b/c to do so can disrupt group harmony • Eye contact & eye gaze are particularly powerful nonverbal cues • The most important pt of emblems is that they are not universal; each culture has devised its own emblems Gender & Nonverbal Communication • Many studies that women are better at both decoding & encoding • Men are better at detecting lies • While women have the ability to decode nonverbal cues of lying, they tend to turn off this skill in the face of deception, in polite deference to the speaker • Member of the society expect men & women to have certain attributes that are consistent with their role. Consequently, women are expected to be more nurturing, friendly, expressive, & sensitive than men b/c of their primary role as caregivers to children & elderly family members • Men & women develop different sets of skills & attitudes, based on their experiences in their gender roles • b/c women are less powerful in societies & less likely to occupy roles of higher status, it is more important for women to learn to be accommodating & polite than it is for men • the tendency of women to be nonverbally polite in this manner was especially strong in those cultures where women are most oppressed Implicit Personality Theories: Filling in the Blanks • this efficiency can come at some cost & in some cases could even be fatal Culture & Implicit Personality Theories • implicit personality theories are strongly tied to culture • different cultures have different ideas about personality types • Hoffman hypothesized that these culturally specific implicit personality theories would influence the way people form impressions of others • The language people speak influences the way they think about the world • We make guesses about their personalities, such as how friendly or outgoing they are, often based on their nonverbal behaviour • To answer this why question, we use our immediate observations to form more elegant & complex inferences about what people really are like & what motivates them to act as they do The Nature of the Attributional Process • Naïve or common sense psychology; in Heider’s view, people are like amateur scientists, trying to understand other people’s behaviour by cause • Another of Heider’s important contributions was his observation that people generally prefer internal attributions over external ones The Covariation Model: Internal vs External Attributions • Kelley’s major contribution to attribution theory was the idea that we notice & think about more than one piece of information when we form an impression of another person • Kelley assumed that when we are in the process of forming an attribution, we gather information, or data, that will help us reach a judgment • Kelley identified three key types of information: consensus, distinctiveness, & consistency • People are most likely to make an internal attribution- deciding the behaviour was a result of something about the boss- when the consensus & distinctiveness of the act are low, but the consistency is high • People are likely to make an external attribution if consensus, distinctiveness, & consistency are all high
• When consistency is low, we cannot make a clear internal or external attribution & so resort to a special kind of external or situational attribution, one assumes something unusual or peculiar is going in theses circumstances • The covariation model assumes that people make causal attributions in a rational, logical way • Studies have shown that people don’t use consensus information as much as Kelley’s theory predicted; they rely more on consistency & distinctiveness information when forming attributions. People don’t always have the relevant information they need on all three of Kelley’s dimensions The Correspondence Bias: People as Personality Psychologists • Research has shown that when people are convicted of committing crimes, attributions play a role in the severity of sentencing • The pervasive, fundamental theory or schema most of us have about human behaviour is that people do what they do b/c of the kind of people they are, not b/c of the situation they are in • The correspondence bias is so pervasive that many social psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error The Role of Perceptual Salience in the Fundamental Attribution Error • The situational causes of another person’s behaviour are practically invisible to us • People, not the situation, have perceptual salience for us- people are what our eyes & ears notice • Perceptual salience, or our visual pov, helps explain why the fundamental attribution error is so widespread. We focus our attention more on people than on the surrounding situation b/c the situation is so hard to see or know The Two-Step Process of Making Attributions • We make internal attributions; we assume that a person’s behaviour was due to something about that person. In the 2nd step, we attempt to adjust this attribution by considering the situation the person was in. But we often don’t make enough of an adjustment in this 2nd step Consequences of the Fundamental Attribution Error • Another way in which the fundamental attribution error leads to victim blaming is when people decide that victims could have exercised control over the situation but didn’t Culture & the Fundamental Attribution Error • The FAE is most likely to occur in North America & other Western cultures that emphasize individual freedom & autonomy • Hindu participants preferred situational explanations for their friends’ behaviour The Actor/Observer Difference • In line with the actor/observer difference, there is evidence that people perceive more consistency in the attitudes of other people than in their own attitudes Perceptual Salience Revisited • When it come to ourselves, we notice our own situation more than our own behaviour • They are swayed by the information that is most salient & noticeable to them: the actor for the observer, & the situation for the actor The Role of Information Availability in the Actor/Observer Difference • In Kelley’s terms, actors have far more consistency & distinctiveness information about themselves than observers do Self-Serving Attributions • When people’s self-esteem is threatened, they often make self-serving attributions • It leads people to believe that their actions are rational & defensible, but that the actions of others are unreasonable & unjustified • Self-serving biases also tend to creep in whenever we work on tasks with other • The self-serving bias has a strong cultural component as well Defensive Attributions • People also alter their attributions to deal with other kinds of threats to their self-esteem
• If we are in the process of assessing the pros & cons of staying in a relationship, we tend to be in a more realistic frame of mind. & this greater realism enables us to make more accurate forecasts about the chances of the relationship surviving Belief in a Just World • Research conducted at the UofCalgary shows that people are so motivated to maintain the belief that world is a just place that they will engage in irrational thinking in order to preserve this belief Consequences of Just-World Beliefs • It has been found that the victims of crimes or accidents are often seen as causing their fate • There was greater blame of female victims than male victims How Accurate Are Our Attributions & Impressions? • We are not very accurate, especially compared with how accurate we think we are • It is also the case that as we get to know someone & observe them in a wider variety of situations, our impressions become more specific & finely nuanced • We are quite accurate perceivers of other people
• When consistency is low, we cannot make a clear internal or external attribution & so resort to a special kind of external or situational attribution, one assumes something unusual or peculiar is going in theses circumstances • The covariation model assumes that people make causal attributions in a rational, logical way • Studies have shown that people don’t use consensus information as much as Kelley’s theory predicted; they rely more on consistency & distinctiveness information when forming attributions. People don’t always have the relevant information they need on all three of Kelley’s dimensions The Correspondence Bias: People as Personality Psychologists • Research has shown that when people are convicted of committing crimes, attributions play a role in the severity of sentencing • The pervasive, fundamental theory or schema most of us have about human behaviour is that people do what they do b/c of the kind of people they are, not b/c of the situation they are in • The correspondence bias is so pervasive that many social psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error The Role of Perceptual Salience in the Fundamental Attribution Error • The situational causes of another person’s behaviour are practically invisible to us • People, not the situation, have perceptual salience for us- people are what our eyes & ears notice • Perceptual salience, or our visual pov, helps explain why the fundamental attribution error is so widespread. We focus our attention more on people than on the surrounding situation b/c the situation is so hard to see or know The Two-Step Process of Making Attributions • We make internal attributions; we assume that a person’s behaviour was due to something about that person. In the 2nd step, we attempt to adjust this attribution by considering the situation the person was in. But we often don’t make enough of an adjustment in this 2nd step Consequences of the Fundamental Attribution Error • Another way in which the fundamental attribution error leads to victim blaming is when people decide that victims could have exercised control over the situation but didn’t Culture & the Fundamental Attribution Error • The FAE is most likely to occur in North America & other Western cultures that emphasize individual freedom & autonomy • Hindu participants preferred situational explanations for their friends’ behaviour The Actor/Observer Difference • In line with the actor/observer difference, there is evidence that people perceive more consistency in the attitudes of other people than in their own attitudes Perceptual Salience Revisited • When it come to ourselves, we notice our own situation more than our own behaviour • They are swayed by the information that is most salient & noticeable to them: the actor for the observer, & the situation for the actor The Role of Information Availability in the Actor/Observer Difference • In Kelley’s terms, actors have far more consistency & distinctiveness information about themselves than observers do Self-Serving Attributions • When people’s self-esteem is threatened, they often make self-serving attributions • It leads people to believe that their actions are rational & defensible, but that the actions of others are unreasonable & unjustified • Self-serving biases also tend to creep in whenever we work on tasks with other • The self-serving bias has a strong cultural component as well Defensive Attributions • People also alter their attributions to deal with other kinds of threats to their self-esteem
• If we are in the process of assessing the pros & cons of staying in a relationship, we tend to be in a more realistic frame of mind. & this greater realism enables us to make more accurate forecasts about the chances of the relationship surviving Belief in a Just World • Research conducted at the UofCalgary shows that people are so motivated to maintain the belief that world is a just place that they will engage in irrational thinking in order to preserve this belief Consequences of Just-World Beliefs • It has been found that the victims of crimes or accidents are often seen as causing their fate • There was greater blame of female victims than male victims How Accurate Are Our Attributions & Impressions? • We are not very accurate, especially compared with how accurate we think we are • It is also the case that as we get to know someone & observe them in a wider variety of situations, our impressions become more specific & finely nuanced • We are quite accurate perceivers of other people
