1. Social Perception The ways in which people perceive on another

2. Making Sense of Others: How you form your judgments

3. Primacy & Recency Effects
Primacy Effect – Tendency to make an opinion on another person based on a first impression.
If 1st impression positive we’ll be more likely to get to know them.
We’ll interpret a person’s 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.

4. 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

5. 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 person’s unique qualities and makes a conclusion on very limited information.

6. Prior Information Effects*
Mental representations of people (schemas) can effect our interpretation of them
Kelley’s 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

7. Attribution: Explaining the Causes of Behavior

8. Attribution Theory
We often explain behavior of others differently than we would our own behavior
People tend to give a causal explanation for someone’s behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition or personality

9. Situational Disposition
Attributing someone’s actions to the various factors in the situation

10. Dispositional Attribution
Attributing someone’s actions to the person’s disposition, i.e. their thoughts, feelings, personality characteristics, etc.

11. Effects of Attributions

12. Attribution Can Lead to Errors
Fundamental attribution error
Actor-observer discrepancy
Blaming the victim (just-world hypothesis)
Self-serving bias
Self-effacing bias

13. Fundamental Attribution Error
Explains how we view OTHER’S behaviors
The tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s 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

14. 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?

15. Actor-Observer Bias Explains how we view our OWN behavior
Attribute personality causes of behavior when evaluating someone else’s 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 don’t 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.
Instructors may wish to discuss the research that shows that we tend to explain ingroup/our successes and others' failures as personality-driven, while we tend to explain ingroup/our failures and others' successes as situational when discussing the actor-observer discrepancy

16. Self-Serving Bias
Tendency to take the credit for successful outcomes of one’s own behavior
Unsuccessful outcomes blamed on external, situational causes beyond our control
Individualistic Cultures do this.

17. 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 person’s behavior to external, situational factors rather than to internal, personal

18. Discovering Psy2e Table 11.1 page 416