Social Perception

1. SOCIAL PERCEPTION
the process through which we seek to know and understand other people

2. ASPECTS OF PERSON PERCEPTION
• First we learn about others through Nonverbal communication—
information provided not by their words, but by their facial
expressions, eye contact, body movements, postures, and even
changes in their body chemistry, which are communicated through
tiny amounts of substances released into the air.
• Then we examine Attribution, the process through which we attempt
to understand the reasons behind others’ behavior—why they have
acted as they have in a given situation, what goals they are seeking,
and what intentions they have.
• Then Examine the nature of Impression Formation—how we form
first impressions of others, and impression management (or self-
presentation)—how we try to ensure that these impressions are
favorable ones

3. Nonverbal communication
• Communication between individuals that does not involve
the content of spoken language. It relies instead on an
unspoken language of facial expressions, eye contact, and
body language.
• Facial Expressions
• Gazes and stares: eye contact as a nonverbal cue
• Body language: gestures, posture, and movements
• Touching
• Scent

4. Facial Feedback Hypothesis
The facial feedback hypothesis (Laird, 1984) suggests
that there is a close link between the facial expressions
we show and our internal feelings, and that this
relationship works both ways: the expressions we show
reflect our internal feelings or emotions, but in
addition, these expressions also feed back into our
brains and influence our subjective experiences of
emotion.

5. Attribution: Understanding the causes of
other’s behaviour
•Correspondent inference: A theory describing
how we use others’ behavior as a basis for
inferring their stable dispositions, Jones and
Davis’s (1965).
•Freely chosen actions
•Low in social desirability

6. Kelley’s theory of causal attributions: How we
answer the question “why?”
• Consensus: The extent to which other people react to some
stimulus or even in the same manner as the person we are
considering.
• Consistency: The extent to which an individual responds to a
given stimulus or situation in the same way on different
occasions (i.e., across time).
• Distinctiveness: The extent to which an individual responds
in the same manner to different stimuli or events.

8. Errors in Attribution
• Correspondence bias(fundamental attribution error): The tendency to
explain others’ actions as stemming from dispositions even in the presence
of clear situational causes.
• The tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional cues on others’
behavior.
• Actor-observer effect: The tendency to attribute our own behavior mainly
to situational causes but the behavior of others mainly to internal
(dispositional) causes.
• Self-serving bias: The tendency to attribute positive outcomes to internal
causes (e.g., one’s own traits or characteristics) but negative outcomes or
events to external causes (e.g., chance, task difficulty).

9. Impression Formation & Impression
Management
• First impression of this person—a mental representation that is the basis
for our reactions to him or her.
• Gestalt psychologists-“The whole is often greater than the sum of its
parts”.
• “CENTRAL TRAITS”
• Asch’s Research on Central and Peripheral Traits
•Intelligent—skillful—industrious—warm—determined—
practical—cautious
•Intelligent—skillful—industrious—cold—determined—
practical—cautious
•Implicit personality theories: Beliefs about what traits or characteristics
tend to go together.
•Thin slices: Refers to small amounts of information about others we use to
form first impressions of them.

10. Impression Management
• Social psychologists use the term impression management (or self-
presentation) to describe these efforts to make a good impression on
others, and the results of their research on this process suggest that it
is well worth the effort: People who perform impression management
successfully do often gain important advantages in many situations.
• While individuals use many different techniques for boosting their
image, most of these fall into two major categories: self
enhancement—efforts to increase their appeal to others—and other-
enhancement—efforts to make the target person feel good in various
ways.