Social Perception The ways in which people perceive on another

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Social PerceptionThe ways in which people
perceive on another
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Making Sense of OthersHow you form your
judgments
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Primacy Recency Effects

• Primacy Effect Tendency to make an opinion on
  another person based on a first impression.
• If 1st impression positive well be more likely
  to get to know them.
• Well interpret a persons future behaviors more
  positively if their first impressions was a good
  one.
• Recency Effect when people change their
  opinions of others based on recent interactions
  with them.

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Person Perception

• Mental processes we use to form judgments and
  draw conclusions about the characteristics and
  motives of others
• This is an active subjective process that
  occurs in a interpersonal context that has three
  components
• The characteristics of the person you are sizing
  up
• Your own characteristics as a perceiver
• The specific situation the process occurs in

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Social Categorization

• Mental process of classifying people into groups
  on the basis of their shared characteristics.
• Much of it is automatic and spontaneous, and it
  often occurs outside conscious awareness
• Categories are usually broad gender, race, age,
  occupation.
• Using social categories helps us mentally
  organize and remember info about others but may
  lead to inaccurate conclusions.
• It ignores a persons unique qualities and makes
  a conclusion on very limited information.

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Prior Information Effects

• Mental representations of people (schemas) can
  effect our interpretation of them
• Kelleys study
• students had a guest speaker
• before the speaker came, half got a written bio
  saying speaker was very warm, half got bio
  saying speaker was rather cold
• very warm group rated guest more positively
  than rather cold group

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Attribution Explaining the Causes of Behavior
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Attribution Theory

• We often explain behavior of others differently
  than we would our own behavior
• People tend to give a causal explanation for
  someones behavior, often by crediting either the
  situation or the persons disposition or
  personality

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Situational Disposition

• Attributing someones actions to the various
  factors in the situation

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Dispositional Attribution

• Attributing someones actions to the persons
  disposition, i.e. their thoughts, feelings,
  personality characteristics, etc.

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Effects of Attributions
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Attribution Can Lead to Errors

• Fundamental attribution error
• Actor-observer discrepancy
• Blaming the victim (just-world hypothesis)
• Self-serving bias
• Self-effacing bias

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Fundamental Attribution Error

• Explains how we view OTHERS behaviors
• The tendency for observers, when analyzing
  anothers behavior, to give too much weight to
  personality and not enough to situational
  variables
• People tend to blame or credit the person more
  than the situation.
• It is common in individualistic cultures

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Using Attitudes as Ways to Justify Injustice

• Just-world bias
• a tendency to believe that life is fair, people
  get what they deserve and deserve what they get
• it would seem horrible to think that you can be a
  really good person and bad things could happen to
  you anyway
• Just-world bias leads to blaming the victim
• we explain others misfortunes as being their
  fault,
• e.g., she deserved to be mugged, what was she
  doing in that neighborhood anyway?

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Actor-Observer Bias

• Explains how we view our OWN behavior
• Attribute personality causes of behavior when
  evaluating someone elses behavior
• Attribute situational when evaluating our own
  behavior
• We tend to judge a person on their actions we see
  whether these are a true reflections of that
  person or not.
• Why?
• hypothesis 1
• we know our behavior changes from situation to
  situation, but we dont know this about others
• hypothesis 2
• when we see others perform an action, we
  concentrate on actor, not situation -- when we
  perform an action, we see environment, not person
• See the Active Psych Demo for more info on this.

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Self-Serving Bias

• Tendency to take the credit for successful
  outcomes of ones own behavior
• Unsuccessful outcomes blamed on external,
  situational causes beyond our control
• Individualistic Cultures do this.

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Self-Effacing Bias

• Modesty bias - involves blaming failure on
  internal, personal factors, while attributing
  success to external, situational factors
• Collectivist cultures do this.
• Less likely to commit the fundamental attribution
  error
• More likely to attribute the causes of another
  persons behavior to external, situational
  factors rather than to internal, personal

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