100 CHAPTER 3 Social Perception: Perceiving and Understanding Others
SUMMARY and R E V I E W
● Social perception involves the processes through which
we seek to understand other people. It plays a key role
in social behavior and social thought. In order to under-
stand others’ emotional states, we often rely on nonverbal
communication—an unspoken language of facial expres-
sions, eye contact, and body movements and postures.
While facial expressions for all basic emotions may not be as
universal as once believed, they do often provide useful infor-
mation about others’ emotional states. Useful information on
this issue is also provided by eye contact, body language,
touching, and even scent. Growing evidence indicates that
facial expressions are an especially important source of non-
verbal information about others. Recent findings indicate that
handshaking provides useful nonverbal cues about others’
personalities, and can influence first impressions of strangers.
Scent also serves as a nonverbal cue, and subtle cues concern-
ing women’s menstrual cycle can be transmitted in this way.
● The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that we not only show
what we feel in our facial expressions, these expressions influ-
ence our emotional states. If we pay careful attention to cer-
tain nonverbal cues, we can recognize efforts at deception by
others—even if these people are from a culture other than
our own. Whether emotions are perceived as “inside” people
or largely between them seems to depend on cultural factors.
● In order to obtain information about others’ lasting
traits, motives, and intentions, we often engage in
attribution—efforts to understand why they have acted
as they have. According to Jones and Davis’s theory of
correspondent inference, we attempt to infer others’
traits from observing certain aspects of their behavior—
especially behavior that is freely chosen, produces non-
common effects, and is low in social desirability. According
to another theory, Kelley’s theory of causal attribution, we
are interested in the question of whether others’ behavior
stemmed from internal or external causes. To answer this
question, we focus on information relating to consensus,
consistency, and distinctiveness. Two other important
dimensions of causal attribution relate to whether specific
causes of behavior are stable over time and controllable or
not controllable.
● Another issue relating to attribution concerns the extent
to which we attribute events in our lives to fate—what was
“meant to be”—or to personal causes. Individuals who believe
strongly in the existence of God are more likely to attribute
improbable but important events to “what was meant to be”;
this is also true of people whose cultural heritage accepts com-
plex causality for important events. Attribution is subject to
many potential sources of bias. One of the most important of
these is the correspondence bias—the tendency to explain
others’ actions as stemming from dispositions even in the
presence of situational causes. Despite major changes in gen-
der roles in recent decades, many people continue to attribute
emotional displays by women to dispositional factors (“they