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Perceiving Others (Chapter 5)

We begin our second section of class with a chapter on what is often referred to as “Social Perception.” You can think about it as the processes we go through in order to understand others (and to a certain extent, understand ourselves). It makes a lot of sense that in order to live in this world, we need to make some sense of it, and not surprisingly couple of the themes we encounter often is that we make sense of it in an egocentric way (of course, we want to protect the “self” and benefit ourselves) and it is done without awareness (people think intuition is very valuable but often, it can be wrought with errors and biases). Some major topics covered: Impression Formation, Nonverbal communication, Causal Attribution, Biases in attributions and Individual differences.

Initial impression formation (person perception)

· Accuracy

· Nonverbal behavior

· Negative info

· Detecting deception – how good are we?

· Averaging traits

· Central traits – Asch’s 1946 warm/cold study (also involved primacy)

· Importance of primacy and recency effects in impression formation – cognitive misers & assimilation (halo effect)

Causal attribution = process of trying to determine cause of behaviors

· Personal (internal, dispositional) vs. situational (external)

· Unexpected vs. expected (don’t worry about this for exam)

· Covariation Principle (just know basics: consensus, consistency, distinctiveness)

· Weiner’s Attributions for success/failure (just understand the dimensions)

Biases in Attribution

· fundamental attribution error/correspondence bias

· actor-observer effect or difference

· self-serving attributions/bias

· ultimate attribution bias

· just world hypothesis (defensive attributions)

Individual & Cultural Differences

· Cognitive accessibility – what does it refer to?

· Need for Cognition – basic meaning

· Entity vs. incremental theorists – what are key differences?

· Attributional style (facing negative events, internal, stable, global = negative AS; external, unstable, specific = positive AS)

· AS & consequences: learned helplessness, unrealistic optimism, self-handicapping

· Don’t forget the importance of culture (discussed throughout) – so primary difference in individualism vs. collectivism

Okay, that’s it for now. In this chapter, you’ve encountered several important topics in Social Psychology that relate to how we perceive others. One important takeaway should be that we would all benefit from taking time in making our evaluations and judgments of others (and of ourselves) so we don’t fall prey to so many naturally occurring biases.

Next time, on to another interesting discussion of such topics as social influence, conformity, and obedience …