Perceiving Persons

(aka Social
Perception)
Chapter 4
Game Plan
• Observation: The Elements of Social Perception
• A person’s physical appearance
• Perceptions of situations
• Detecting truth and deception
• Attribution: From Elements to Dispositions
• Attribution theories
• Attribution biases
• Culture and attribution
• Motivational Biases
• Integration: From Dispositions to Impressions
• Perceiver characteristics
• Perceptions of moral character
• Confirmation Biases: From Impressions to Reality
• Perseverance of beliefs
• Confirmatory hypothesis testing
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
Observation:
The Elements of Social Perception
 Social Perception
• Social Perception
• A general term for the processes by which we come to understand one
another
• The process of collecting and interpreting information about another
person’s individual characteristics
 True or False?

The impressions we form of others are influenced by

superficial aspects of their appearance.

TRUE
 The Elements of Social Perception: Persons
• How do we understand other people?
• What kinds of information do we use, since we cannot “see” someone’s
mental, emotional, or motivation states?
 The Elements of Social Perception: Persons
• A Person’s Physical Appearance
• We pre-judge people based on facial features
• We spontaneously judge a person’s traits based on their facial features:
• Attractive, likable, competent, trustworthy, aggressive
• Tendency to judge traits based on facial features is
• Quick, automatic
• Develops early in life (as early as 3-4 years)
Who is warmer?
Who is more trustworthy?
 The Elements of Social Perception: Persons
• A Person’s Physical Appearance
• We judge “baby-faced” adults differently than “mature-faced” adults
• Large, round eyes
• High eyebrows
• Round cheeks
• Large forehead
• Smooth skin
• Rounded chin
• Perceived as warm, kind, naïve, weak, honest, and submissive
 The Elements of Social Perception: Persons
• A Person’s Physical Appearance
• Why do we judge “baby-faced” adults differently?
• We are genetically programmed to respond gently to infantile features
• We learn to associate infantile features with helplessness
 Generalize this expectation to baby-faced adults
The Elements of Social Perception: Situations
• We often have “scripts” or preset notions about certain types of situations
• Enable us to anticipate the goals, behaviors, and outcomes likely to occur in
a particular setting
• The more experience we have in a given situation, the more details our
scripts will contain
• E.g., date scripts, classroom scripts, etc.
• Knowledge of social settings provides an important context for
understanding other people’s verbal and non-verbal behavior
• E.g., job interview vs. family dinner vs. party
The Elements of Social Perception: Situations
• How do scripts influence social perception?
• We sometimes see what we expect to see in a particular situation
• We use what we know about social situations to explain the causes of
human behavior
The Elements of Social Perception: Situations
• Our expectations for how situations
affect us can influence the way we
interpret other people’s facial
expressions
• Interpretation of ambiguous faces
influenced by expected situation
• Same expression can be
interpreted in multiple ways!
The Elements of Social Perception: Situations
• How good are people at identifying emotions in faces?
The Elements of Social Perception: Behavior
• An essential first step in social perception is recognizing what someone is doing
at a given moment
• Identifying actions from movement is quite easy!
The Elements of Social Perception: Behavior
• Mind Perception
• The process by which we attribute humanlike mental states to various
inanimate objects
• The more humanlike the target object is, the more likely we are to attribute
to it qualities of the mind
• Siri, Alexa
The Elements of Social Perception: Behavior
• The Silent Language of Non-Verbal Behavior
• Non-verbal behavior (aka Body Language)
• The ways in which people stand, sit, walk, and express themselves with
various gestures
• People across cultures can identify six basic emotions
• Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust
• But there is an “in-group advantage”
• Nonverbal cues vary in meaning from one culture to the next
• Eye contact, personal space habits, nodding/shaking head, smiling,
greetings
 True or False?

Adaptively, people are skilled at knowing when

someone is lying rather than telling the truth.

FALSE
The Elements of Social Perception: Detecting
Truth and Deception
The Elements of Social Perception: Detecting
Truth and Deception
• Four channels of communication provide relevant information:
1. Words
2. The face
3. The body
4. The voice [leakiest of all four]
The Elements of Social Perception: Detecting
Truth and Deception
• When people have a reason to lie:
1. Words  Cannot be trusted
2. The face  Is controllable
3. The body  Is somewhat revealing (fidgeting, restless shifts in posture)
4. The voice  Most revealing
• Rises in pitch
• Increase in number of speech hesitation
Attributions:
From Elements to Dispositions
 Attribution Basics
• Attribution Theory
• A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior
• Personal Attribution
• Attribution to internal characteristics of an actor
• Ability, personality, mood, or effort
• Situational Attribution
• Attribution to causes external to an actor
• The task, other people, or luck
 Correspondent Inference Theory
• Jones and Davis (1965)
• People try to infer from an action whether the act corresponds to an
enduring personal trait of the actor
• Factors that influence attribution:
• Choice– behavior that is freely chosen is more informative
• Expectedness of behavior– An action tells us more about a person
when it deviates from the norm than when it is typical
• Effects– Acts that produce many desirable outcomes do not reveal
actor’s specific motives
 Covariation Theory
• Kelley (1967)
• Three important elements in order to come up with attributions for
behavior:
• Consistency (covariation of behavior across time)
• Consensus (covariation of behavior across people)
• Distinctiveness (how unique the behavior is to the certain situation)
Covariation Theory
Covariation Theory
 Attribution Biases: Cognitive Heuristics
• Cognitive Heuristics
• Information-processing rules of thumb
• Mental shortcuts that help us process information in ways that are:
• Quick and easy
• But often lead to error
 Attribution Biases: Cognitive Heuristics
• Availability Heuristic
• The tendence to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by
how easily instances of it come to mind
• Some questions!
• Which are more frequent: Words that start with the letter “r” or
words with “r” as the third letter?
• Which are deadlier: sharks or horses?
• Which kills more people each year: car accidents, homicides, and
suicides combined, or cancer?
 Attribution Biases: Cognitive Heuristics
• Base-Rate Fallacy
• Our insensitivity to consensus information presented in the forms of
numerical base rates (lottery, plane crash, etc.)

• False Consensus Effect

• The tendency for us to overestimate the extent to which others share
our opinions, attributes, and behaviors
 Attribution Biases: Cognitive Heuristics
• Counterfactual Thinking
• The tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might have occurred
but did not
• Thoughts about what might have, could have, or should have happened
“if only” something had occurred differently
• Thoughts counter to the facts 
• Effects?
• Emotional Amplification due to Counterfactuals
• Increase in an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how
easy it is to imagine the event not happening
• Olympic podium: Bronze Trumps Silver?!
Counterfactual Thinking
 The Fundamental Attribution Error
• What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
• The tendency to overestimate the role of personal factors and overlook
the impact of situations when explaining other people’s behavior
• “They brought it upon themselves”
 The Fundamental Attribution Error
• Actor-Observer Effect
• Our tendency to make personal attributions for the behavior of others
and situational attributions for ourselves
• Especially when experiencing bad outcomes
• Inverse with success
 The Fundamental Attribution Error
• We are more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error when
• We are cognitively busy
• We are distracted
• We are less likely to commit the fundamental attribution error when
• We take time before making our judgments
• We are highly motivated to be careful and accurate
 Culture and Attribution
• Culture shapes the kind of attributions we make about people and social situations
• Western cultures  Persons are autonomous, motivated by internal forces,
responsible for their own actions
• More likely to make personal attributions
• Non-Western, “collectivist” cultures  More holistic view that emphasizes the
relationship between individuals and their social surroundings
Fundamental Attribution Error: A Western Bias?
 Motivational Biases
• Wishful Seeing
• AKA motivated visual perception
• We have a tendency to see what we
want to see
• What do you see?
 Motivational Biases
• Just World Hypothesis
• The belief that the world is a just and fair place and that people get
what they deserve in life
• Very prevalent in cases of rape victims (rape myth!) and domestic abuse
• Sometimes leads to derogating victims just to maintain this sense of a
just world
Integration:
From Dispositions to Impressions
 Information Integration: The Arithmetic
• How do we approach the process of impression formation?
• The process of integrating information about a person to form a
coherent impression
• Information Integration Theory
• Impressions formed of others are based on an integration of
(1) Personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver
(2) Weighted average (not a simple average) of the target person’s
characteristics
 Perceiver Characteristics
• Each of us is more likely to notice certain traits than others
• Our mood influences impressions we form
• Positive mood  More optimistic and lenient + less critical attributions
 Perceiver Characteristics: Priming Effects
• Priming Effects
• Priming = Tendency for frequently or recently used concepts to come
to mind easily and influence the way we interpret new information
• Priming can influence person impressions
Perceiver Characteristics: Priming Effects
Unconscious
Priming of
Social
Behavior
 Target Characteristics
• We focus on dimensions warmth and competence when we are forming
impressions of others
• Will discuss more in Chapter 5
• We also focus on perceptions of moral character
 Perceptions of Moral Character
• Accurate perceptions of moral character are essential to determining
whether someone can be trusted
• Judgments about a person’s morality are made instantly and intuitively
• Moral vs. Warm
• Moral = Courageous, fair, principled, just, honest, trustworthy, loyal
• Warm = Warm, sociable, happy, agreeable, enthusiastic, easygoing,
fun, playful
 Perceptions of Moral Character
• The Primacy Effect
• The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have
more impact than information presented later
• Why does it happen?
• Perceivers think they have already formed an accurate impression
 Pay less attention to subsequent information
• Change-of-meaning hypothesis
• Once people have formed an impression, they start to interpret
subsequent information in light of that impression
Confirmation Biases:
From Impressions to Reality
 Confirmation Biases
• Confirmation Biases
• Tendencies to interpret, seek, and create information in ways that
verify existing beliefs
• Once we make up our mind about something, we are unlikely to
change it (even when confronted with new evidence)
Confirmation Biases: Perseverance of Beliefs
• Perseverance of Beliefs
• The tendency to maintain beliefs even after they have been discredited
• Why does it happen?
• Once we form an opinion, simply thinking about the topic
strengthens the opinion
• How can it be reduced or eliminated?
• When we are asked to consider why alternative explanations may
be true
Confirmation Biases: Confirmatory Hypothesis
Testing
• Do we seek information objectively, or are we inclined to confirm the
suspicions we already hold?
• Our expectations can influence the evidence we choose to look for
• We are often unaware of our own existing beliefs
 Confirmation Biases: Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• The process by which our expectations about a person eventually lead
that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations
 Confirmation Biases: Depressive Realism
• Depressed people’s interpretations of reality are more accurate
• Non-depressed people protect themselves by seeing everything in an
unrealistically positive manner (the ‘illusory glow’)
• Self-fulfilling prophecy?
In Sum
 Next Week (September 26, 28, 30)
• Please read:
• Chapter 5: Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
• Reminder
• Research Paper Topic Selection due by Friday, September 30th, 11:59PM

Have a lovely weekend! 