Social Perception

What is Social Perception?

• Social perception is the study of how people form impressions of and
make inferences about other people as sovereign personalities. Social
perception refers to identifying and utilizing social cues to make
judgments about social roles, relationships, rules, context, or the
characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness) of others.
• This domain also includes social knowledge, which refers to one’s
knowledge of social roles, norms, and schemas surrounding social
situations and interactions. People learn about others' feelings and
emotions by picking up information they gather from physical
appearance, verbal, and nonverbal communication. Facial expressions,
tone of voice, hand gestures, and body position or movement are a few
examples of ways people communicate without words. There are four
main components of social perception: observation, attribution,
integration, and confirmation.
 Observation
• Observations serve as the raw data of social perception—an interplay of
three sources: persons, situations, and behavior. These sources are used as
evidence in supporting a person's impression or inference about others.
Another important factor to understand when talking about social
perception is attribution. Attribution is expressing an individual's personality
as the source or cause of their behavior during an event or situation. To fully
understand the impact of personal or situational attributions, social
perceivers must integrate all available information into a unified impression.
To finally confirm these impressions, people try to understand, find, and
create information in the form of various biases. Most importantly, social
perception is shaped by an individual's current motivations, emotions, and
cognitive load capacity. Cognitive load is the complete amount of mental
effort utilized in the working memory. All of this combined determines how
people attribute certain traits and how those traits are interpreted.
• i. Persons – physical influence Although society tries to train
people not to judge others based on their physical traits, as
social perceivers, we cannot help but be influenced by others'
hair, skin color, height, weight, style of clothes, pitch in voice,
etc., when making a first impression. People have the
tendency to judge others by associating certain facial features
with specific personality types. For example, studies indicate
that people are perceived as stronger, more assertive, and
competent if they have small eyes, low eyebrows, an angular
chin, wrinkled skin, and a small forehead. People tend to
associate baby-faced people with impotence and
harmlessness.
• ii. Situations – context from prior experiences People are able to easily predict the
sequences or results of an event based on the extent and depth of their past
experiences with a similar event. The ability to anticipate the outcomes of a situation
is also greatly influenced by an individual's cultural background because this
inevitably shapes the types of experiences. Situational observations either lead
humans to have preset notions about certain events or to explain the causes of
human behaviors. iii. Behaviors – nonverbal communication Nonverbal
communication helps people express their emotions, attitudes, and personalities.
The most dominant form of nonverbal communication is the use of facial expressions
to channel different emotions. Greatly influenced by Charles Darwin's research on
facial expressions and book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872), it is believed that all humans, regardless of culture or race, encode and
decode the six "primary" emotions, (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and
disgust), universally in the same way. To encode means to communicate nonverbal
behavior, while to decode means to interpret the meaning or intention of the
nonverbal behavior.
 2. Attribution
• Attribution theories A large component of social perception is attribution.
Attribution is the use of information gathered through observation to help
individuals understand and rationalize the causes of one's own and others'
behaviors. Psychological research on attribution began with the work of Fritz
Heider in 1958, and was subsequently developed by others such as Harold Kelley
and Bernard Weiner. People make attributions to understand the world around
them in order to seek reasons for an individual's particular behavior. When
people make attributions they are able to make judgments as to what was the
cause or causes of a certain behavior. Attribution theory is the study of what
systems and models people implement to make attributions about the behavior
of others. It attempts to explain how we use information about the social
environment to understand others' behavior. One common bias people exhibit in
attribution is called the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental
attribution error is the tendency for people to attribute others' actions or
behaviors to internal traits as opposed to external circumstances.
 Two-step process of Attributions
• The two-step process of attribution suggests that people analyze others'
behaviors first by automatically making an internal attribution and only then
considering possible external attributions that may affect the initial inference.
Heider's most valuable contribution to the topic of attribution is the
dichotomy: When attempting to decide why individuals behave a certain way,
we can make either an internal or external attribution. Internal attribution,
(also called dispositional attribution or personal attribution), is the assumption
that an individual is acting a certain way due to something about that
individual, such as personality, character, or attitude. External attribution, also
called situational attribution, is the inference that an individual is acting a
certain way due to the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most
individuals would respond in the same way in that similar situation. Essentially,
people first assume that a person's behavior is due to his or her personality,
and then attempt to modify this attribution by also factoring in the person's
situation.
 Kelley's covariation theory
• According to American social psychologist Harold Kelley, individuals make
attributions by utilizing the covariation principle. The covariation principle
claims that people attribute behavior to the factors that are present when a
certain behavior occurs and the factors that are absent when it does not
occur. There are three types of covariation information that are particularly
helpful: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency. If a single individual and
a large majority of individuals behave similarly in reaction to a specific
stimulus, then the individual's behavior is attributed to th stimulus and is high
in consensus. The individual's behavior due to this specific stimulus should be
compared to the individual's behavior in reaction other stimuli within the
same broader category. This helps judge whether the level of distinctiveness
information is high, and thus attributed to the stimulus. Lastly, consistency
information is used to see what happens to the behavior at another time
when the individual and the stimulus both remain unchanged.
 3. Integration
• Information integration theory Norman H. Anderson, an American social
psychologist, developed the information integration theory in 1981. The theory
states that impressions are made from the perceiver's personal dispositions and a
weighted average of the target individual's characteristics. The differences among
perceivers are due to people using themselves as a standard, or frame of
reference, when judging or evaluating others. People also tend to view their own
skills and traits as favorable for others to also have. These impressions formed
about others can also be influenced by the current, temporary mood of the
perceiver. A concept called, priming also affects a perceiver's impressions of
others. Priming is the tendency for recently perceived or implemented concepts or
words to come to mind easily and influence the understanding of the new
information. Trait information also impacts people's impressions of others, and
psychologist Solomon Asch was the first to discover that the existence of one trait
tends to indicate the existence of other traits. Asch claimed that central traits exist
that exert a strong effect on the perceiver's overall impressions. [1 ] Lastly, the
sequence in which a trait is realized can also influence the trait's impact. Research
shows that there is a tendency for information presented at the beginning of a
sequence to have a greater effect on impressions than information presented later
on, a concept called primacy effect
 Implicit personality theory
• Implicit personality theory is a type of model people use to group various kinds
of personality qualities together. Put in another way, implicit personality theories
describe the way an observer uses the traits displayed by another person to form
impressions about that other person. People pay attention to a variety of cues,
including: visual, auditory, and verbal cues to predict and understand the
personalities of others, in order to fill in the gap of the unknown information
about a person, which assists with social interactions. Certain traits are seen as
especially influential in the formation of an overall impression of an individual;
these are called central traits. Other traits are less influential in impression
formation, and are called peripheral traits. Which traits are central or peripheral
is not fixed, but can vary based on context. For instance, saying that a person is
warm versus cold may have a central impact on an individual's impression
formation when paired with traits such as "industrious" and "determined", but
have a more peripheral impact when paired with traits such as "shallow" or
"vain".
• Kim and Rosenberg demonstrate that when forming impressions of
others, individuals assess others on an evaluative dimension. Which is
to say that, when asked to describe personality traits of others,
individuals rate others on a "good-bad" dimension. People's implicit
personality theories also include a number of other dimensions, such
as a "strong-weak" dimension, an "active-passive" dimension, an
"attractive-unattractive" dimension, etc. However,the evaluative
"good-bad" dimension was the only one that universally appeared in
people's descriptions of others, while the other dimensions appeared
in many, but not all, people's assessments. Thus, the dimensions
included in implicit personality theories on which others are rated
vary from person to person, but the "good-bad" dimension appears
to be part of all people's implicit personality theories.
 4. Confirmation
• After making and integrating attributions, individuals form impressions
that are subject to confirmation biases and the threat of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Competence as social perceivers It is true that people fall for
the biases identified by social psychologists and for some biases that may
have not yet been identified. Despite these misjudgments, there are four
reasons that soundly demonstrate people's competence as social
perceivers: i. People can more accurately perceive social behaviors and
interactions when they have a greater history of experiences with the
other people. ii. People can make more circumscribed predictions of how
other individuals will act when in their presence. iii. Social perception
skills can be improved through learning the rules of probability and logic.
iv. People can make more precise inferences about others when
motivated by concerns for open-mindedness and accuracy.
Factors that influence social perception
• While accurate social perception is important, it has also
been rather neglected. It is difficult to provide a set list of
criteria that can be checked-off as accuracy can be
subjective in nature. In the past, there was an assumption
that people’s judgments were also considered erroneous
and often mistaken. As such, many researchers have
chosen to pursue other facets of research instead. It was
not until these assumptions were proved incorrect
through research and research methods became more
sophisticated that genuine effort was put into analyzing
accurate social perceptions.
• i. Bias People are prone to numerous types of confirmation biases—
tendencies to construe, find, and formulate information inways that prove
existing opinions. Preconceived prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination
otherwise known as social biases can contribute towards these tendencies.
People are also subject to exhibiting belief perseverance, the tendency to
hold false convictions even after they have been disproved.
• ii. Self ▪ Availability heuristic– Tendency to place more importance and
reliance on more immediate memories when evaluating specific topics,
methods, concepts, or decisions. It is a mental shortcut that operates on
the notion that if something can be recalled, then it must at least be as
important as alternatives that are less easily recalled.
• ▪ Dunning–Kruger effect – An effect by which test takers fail to understand
their poor performance because they suffer a double fault: A.) Shortfall of
knowledge prevents them from producing correct responses & B.) Shortfall
of knowledge prevents them from recognizing their lesser responses when
compared to those of others. ▪ Overconfidence bias– When one's
confidence in their ability is greater than their actual ability.
• ▪ Egocentric bias – The tendency to rely too heavily on one's own
judgments and abilities, stemming partially from the need to satisfy one's
ego
 iii. Group
• Status quo bias – Tendency to favor current or certain
circumstances because they are familiar. Any changes to
these circumstances are perceived as a loss.
• ▪ In group bias – Tendency to favor one's own group
members and their actions over those of outsiders.
• ▪ Stereotyping – Attributing traits to people based on certain
traits of the group they are perceived to belong to.
• ▪ Ensemble Coding - also known as ensemble perception or
summary representation, is the ability to see the average or
variance of a group of objects. There is extensive amounts of
information available to the visual system.
 iv. Interaction
• Halo effect – Tendency for the observed overall impression of an individual
to affect the observers feelings and thoughts about other attributes or
traits of the individual.
• ▪ False-consensus effect – Tendency for people to overestimate the
magnitude to which people share their behaviors, opinions, and attributes.
• ▪ Base-rate fallacy – Tendency to prefer specific information over Base rate
or generic information.
• ▪ Psychological projection – A defense mechanism people unconsciously
use to grapple with challenging feelings or emotions by attributing them to
others. This incorporates Blame shifting.
• ▪ Actor-Observer bias – Tendency of those acting in a situation to blame
their actions on the situation, while those observing have the tendency to
place the blame on the actors.