Social Perception The ways in which people perceive on another

Making Sense of Others: How you form your judgments

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.

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

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.

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

Attribution: Explaining the Causes of Behavior

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

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

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

Effects of Attributions

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

Discovering Psy2e Table 11.1 page 416