Social Cognition and Perception

Social Cognition and Perception: refers to the mental processes that help us to collect and remember information about others, and to form beliefs and attitudes and make judgments based on that information. In our social world, we do not respond to objective reality. Rather, we respond to our subjective interpretations of reality.

I. Impressions A. Impression Management: our efforts to produce a favorable first impression on other people. B. Tactics of impression management success… 1) Self-Enhancement: attempts to boost our own image. 2) Other-Enhancement: attempts to make the other person feel good. C. Impression Formation: refers to the process through which we form an impression of another person or group of people. D. Do you think that first impressions really are all that important? E. Asch’s Research on Central and Peripheral Traits

F. Priming: activating particular associations in memory.

G. Interpersonal Primacy Effect: the first information learned about someone will be a more powerful influence on our perceptions than any later information will be. H. Halo Effect: A liked person is assumed to have many other good qualities. I. Horn Effect: A disliked person is assumed to have many other bad qualities.

II. Nonverbal Communication: the way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words. A. Facial Expressions 1) Six Basic Emotions/Facial Expressions… Happiness Sadness Fear Disgust Anger Surprise

B. Eye Contact (gazes and stares) C. Bodily Movements 1) Body Language: the position, posture, or movements of our bodies. 2) Emblems: nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations, like the “OK” sign. D. Touching

III. Other Factors Related to Impressions E. Nonverbal Cues and Deception 1) Micro-expressions: brief and involuntary expressions of emotion (like fear and anger). F. Electronic Communication III. Other Factors Related to Impressions A. Belief Perseverance: persistence of one’s initial conceptions even though the basis for one’s belief is discredited. Yet, an explanation of why the belief might be true survives and continues to influence one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

B. Reconstructing The Past 1) False Memory: a report that an individual believes to be a memory but that does not correspond to actual events. 2) Misinformation effect: incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it.

C. Reconstructing Past Attitudes 1) The Asparagus Effect! 2) Rosy Retrospection: people often recall mildly pleasant events more favorably than they actually experienced them. D. Reconstructing Past Behavior 1) The Teeth Brushing Effect!

IV. Judging our Social Worlds A. Controlled Processing: explicit thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious. B. Automatic Processing: implicit thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness (a.k.a. intuition). C. Overconfidence Phenomenon: the tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.

D. Confirmation Bias: the tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions. 1) Self-Verification Theory: people seek, elicit, and recall feedback that confirms their beliefs about themselves. E. Heuristics: mental shortcuts. F. Representativeness Heuristic: the tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member. 1) Base-Rate Information: the data about the frequency or probability of a given item or event.

G. Availability Heuristic: the strategy of assuming that how easily one can remember examples of something is an indicator of how common that thing actually is. H. Counterfactual Thinking: imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t. The more likely that an alternative scenario or outcome may have occurred, the more likely one will engage in this type of thinking.

V. Attributions A. Attribution Theory: the theory of how we explain the behavior of other individuals; by attributing the behavior to internal dispositions or to external situations. 1) Internal Attributions: explanations based on an individual’s perceived stable characteristics, such as attitudes, personality traits, or abilities. 2) External Attributions: explanations based on the current situation and events that would influence all people.

B. Kelley’s Attribution Model 1) Consistency Information: how the person’s behavior varies over time in a given situation. 2) Distinctiveness: how the person’s behavior varies between situations. 3) Consensus Information: how others behave similarly in this situation.

C. Spontaneous Trait Inference: an effortless, automatic inference of a trait immediately after exposure to someone’s behavior. D. Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon the behavior of other individuals.

E. Actor-Observer Effect: the tendency to make external attributions for our own behaviors and internal ones for the behavior of others. F. Objective Self-Awareness: a self-conscious state in which attention focuses on oneself as an object in the environment.

VI. Expectations A. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy… The case whereby people… 1) Have an expectation about what another person is like, which… 2) influences how they act toward that person, which… 3) causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true.

B. Rosenthal’s Research on Teacher Expectations… Teachers led to believe particular students will bloom: 1) Create a warmer emotional climate for those students, giving them more personal attention, encouragement, and support, 2) Give “bloomers” more challenging material, 3) Give “bloomers” more and better feedback, 4) Give “bloomers” more opportunities to respond in class and give them longer to respond.