1. Chapter 4
Perceiving Persons

2. Social Perception
The process by which people come to understand one another.
We’ll look at:
The “raw data” of social perception
How we explain and analyze behavior
How we integrate our observations into coherent impressions of other persons
How our impressions can subtly create a distorted picture of reality
We’re both perceiver and target

3. Observation: The Elements of Social Perception—Persons
First impressions are often subtly influenced by different aspects of a person’s appearance.
We prejudge people based on facial features.
We read traits from faces, as well as read traits into faces, based on prior information.
We judge “baby-faced” adults differently than “mature-faced” adults.
Why? Explain the explanation.

4. Observation: The Elements of Social Perception—Situations
We often have “scripts” or preset notions about certain types of situations.
Enables us to anticipate the goals, behaviors, and outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting
These scripts help us understand other people’s verbal and nonverbal behavior. How?
We sometimes see what we expect to see in a particular situation.
People use what they know about social situations to explain the causes of human behavior.

5. Silent Language of Nonverbal Behavior
Behavioral cues are used to identify a person’s inner states, as well as his or her actions.
What kinds of nonverbal cues do people use?
Facial expressions of emotion and ….

6. Distinguishing Truth from Deception
Freud: “No mortal can keep a secret… betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
Channels of communication differ in terms of ease of control.
Face is relatively easier for deceivers to control.
Nervous movements of our body are somewhat harder to control.

7. Why Do We Have Difficulty Detecting Deception?
Mismatch between the behavioral cues that actually signal deception and the ones used to detect deception.
Four channels of communication provide relevant information:
Words: Cannot be trusted
Face: Controllable
Body: Somewhat more revealing than face
Voice: Most revealing cue
Perceivers tune in to the wrong channels

8. Attribution Theories
Dispositions: stable characteristics, such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities
Attribution theories describe how people explain the causes of behavior
Heider: Explanations can be grouped into two categories:
Personal Attributions (Internal disposition)
Situational Attributions (External)

9. Jones’s Correspondent Inference Theory
People try to infer from an action whether the act itself corresponds to an enduring personal characteristic of the actor.
People make inferences on the basis of three factors:
Person’s degree of choice
Expectedness of the behavior
Intended effects or consequences of someone’s behavior

10. Kelley’s Covariation Theory
People make attributions using the covariation principle.
Three kinds of covariation are useful:
Consensus: How are other people reacting to the same stimulus?
Distinctiveness: Is the person’s behavior consistent over time?
Consistency: Does the person react the same or differently to different stimuli?

11. Attributional Biases
Do we really analyze behavior in a rational, logical manner?
Do we really have the time, motivation, or cognitive capacity for such elaborate and mindful processes?
The answer?
Sometimes yes…Sometimes no.

12. Cognitive Heuristics
Cognitive heuristics are information-processing rules of thumb.
Enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy
Problem is that using cognitive heuristics can frequently lead to error.

13. Availability Heuristic
The tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind.
Problems with relying on the availability heuristic:
False-consensus effect

14. Fundamental Attribution Error
When we explain other people’s behavior we tend to:
Overestimate the role of personal factors, and
Overlook the impact of situations

15. Why Are Personal Attributions Automatic?
Heider: People see dispositions in behavior because of a perceptual bias.
Actor is the conspicuous figure of your attention.
The situation fades into the background.
So people attribute events to factors that are perceptually conspicuous or salient.
Wishful seeing. See what we _____.
Just-world belief.

16. Priming Effects
Priming: The tendency for recently used words to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information.
Priming can influence person impressions.
Motivations, as well as social behaviors, can be influenced by priming.

17. The Primacy Effect
The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later.
What accounts for this primacy effect?
There are two basic explanations.
Once we think we have formed an accurate impression of someone, we pay less attention to subsequent information. (Belief Perseverance)
Change of Meaning Hypothesis & Confirmation Bias
Once we have formed an impression, we start to interpret inconsistent information in light of that impression.
The meaning of a trait can be malleable.

18. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom” study

19. How Accurate Are People’s Impressions of Each Other?
Question is provocative, but hard to answer.
Problems:
Often exhibit biases in our social perceptions
Often have little awareness of our limitations, leading us to feel overconfident in our judgments
But remember that biases do NOT necessarily result in error.

20. Reasons Why We Can Be Competent Social Perceivers
The more experience we have with each other, the more accurate we are.
Although not good at making global judgments of others, we are able to make more circumscribed predictions.
Certain social perception skills can be improved by being taught rules of probability and logic.
We can form more accurate impressions of others when we are motivated.