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Content Summary: Social Perception
Nickie Sightler
School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University
Psychology 512: Social Psychology
Dr. Stacy Gaines
March 29, 2024
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Introduction
In the chapter readings this week, Kassin discussed The Social Self and
Perceiving
Persons. The Social Self examines three aspects which are self-concept, self-esteem,
and
self-presentation. Self-concept is discussed on how it is considered and how people.
understand themselves and their actions. Self-esteem is discussed on how people
evaluate themselves and defend threats against them to their self-esteem. Self-
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presentation discusses how people present themselves to others. Perceiving Persons
discusses how people come discuss to know or how they think they know other people.
In
discussion of this chapter, they talk about the aspects of a person, situation, and
behaviors
that help the initial observations. In the discussion, it also informs us about how people.
have explanations for the behavior of others. Attributions are also discussed in this
chapter, discussing from elements to dispositions.
In Chapter 4 and 7, Chadee discusses abouts Attribution Theories and How
People
Make Sense of Behavior. Attribution has two meanings, explanations of behavior, traits
from behavior and how a person puts blame to a person. There is discussion on how
the
attribution process is done, and explanation of what behaviors affect the reasons of
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attribution. In Chapter 7, the discussion relates to Social Comparison and the
comparisons of the self and others. There is explanation on the Social Comparison
Theory, which explains how researchers have approached the theory over the decades,
with questioning, “Why people engage in Social Comparisons?”, “Who do they compare
themselves to?”, and “How do Social Comparisons influence the Self?”
In other readings, there is discussion on how responses are to word of mouth
and how social media effect the well-being and how it effects adolescent to adolescent.
The response of word-of-mouth shared information about people react to word of mouth
and how it affects people. It is better to go to the actual source to handle situations that
bother a person instead of just listening to what is being said. Social media affect many
people and how they are affected by the different things that are on social media.
Body
Social Concept
Self-concept refers to the sum of believes people have about themselves.
(Kassin, 2020) People have ways that they think of themselves, and they may do this by
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thinking of being masculine or feminine, independent, or dependent, appearance and
feelings. Self is a special object of our attention. (Kassin, 2020) When thinking about our
self and how it makes a social concept, I think of how people look at themselves in the
world and how they develop their self-concept. Taking a picture to look at ourselves and
how that picture helps us to see ourselves and how we feel that we may or may not fit in
part of the world. Self-Perception gives us insights on how we observe our own
behaviors. The behaviors that we observe of ourselves are our emotions, how we act
toward others, and how we something. Other people seem to be able to observe us
better than we do observe ourselves. People do this by watching our facial expressions
and actions.
Self Esteem
Self-esteem is an effective component of the self, consisting of a person’s
positive and negative emotions. (Kassin, 2020) Our self-esteem is affected by the way
we think of how we look, our worth, wealth, and how we can be part of a group. Self-
worth is an aspect of human motivation that runs deep. (Kassin, 2020) There are
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positive and negative benefits of self-esteem. The positive benefits are that people tend
to be happy, healthy, productive, and successful. The negative benefits are that people
tend to be depressed, pessimistic about the future, and prone to failure. People
sometimes lack the confidence that they need and then this cause them to be trapped in
a cycle of self-defeating. When people try to contain their self-esteem to what they think
it should be, it sometimes causes high stress and anxiety. Self-esteem is very important
to people and if people understand how they need to handle this in their lives, it will help
them to overcome things better.
Self-Presentation
Self-presentation are strategies that people use to shape what others think of
them. (Kassin, 2020) There are types of self-presentation and each of these serve a
different motive. Strategic self-presentation consists of our efforts to shape others’
impressions in specific ways to gain influence, power, sympathy, or approval. (Kassin,
2020) We think of our others look at us and have an impression of who we are by them
observing how we look or how we act. When people stress about what others think of
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them, it causes them to stress and cause problems that affect our health, and we tend
to participate in behaviors that are risk to our health. There is also self-verification which
is the desire to have others to perceive us as we perceive ourselves. Self-monitoring
also is a way we tend to look at ourselves by thinking of how we are so conscious about
how we look in the public. I feel that most people are affected in many of these areas
but to understand how our social self can affect us, would help us to change our outlook
in our lives.
Perceiving Persons
When perceiving a person, we use social perception, how we come to
understand one another. A person’s physical appearance can influence how people are
perceived by others. I have heard many times, “We should not judge a book by its
cover”. People tend to have ways of how they want to express themselves and they do
this by their appearance. People may have multiple tattoos, piercings, dress modest or
not, and they may have false lashes or wear a lot of makeup. This is just the ways
people tend to express themselves and we must be careful how we perceive someone
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because no matter how they look on the outside, we do not know what is going on in the
inside.
Attributions
There are two attributions that are discussed and how they affect people.
Personal attribution is an attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as
ability, personality, mood, or effort. (Kassin, 2020) Situational attribution is an attribution
to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck. (Kassin, 2020) In
Chapter 4 of Theories in Social Psychology, there is discussion about how the different
attributions characterize people and how their behavior is affected. The fundamental
assumption that humans spontaneously explain behavioral and social events has led to
many insights in the domains of social influence, self-regulation, relationships, and
health. (Chadee, 2022) When we are trying to make sense of someone’s behavior, we
to take the time to see what is affecting a person and why it is affecting them. Even
though a person is showing a type of behavior, we do not understand does not mean
that we need to make assumptions of what is going on within that person.
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Conclusion
In these chapters, the discussion talks about how we perceive ourselves and
how we are affected by thinking of what people think of our appearance, interactions
with others, and how we act, and people are perceived. There are many ways people
stress over the way people look at them. People worry about their appearance around
others because they want people to accept them. When people have trouble with
feeling good about themselves and how they are accepted by others, it causes negative
effects. These negative effects cause people to feel alone and down, then they will fall
into doing things that is not good for their health such as drinking, drugs, self-inflicting
harm to themselves, and then this is when situations happen that hurt the people
around them. People in the world need to understand our we affect others just because
of the way they may look or act, messes up the mental health of others and there are
ways to perceive people and not push them away.
Reference:
Kassin, S. (2020), Social Psychology, Cengage Learning, Inc.
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Chadee, D. (2022), Theories in Social Psychology, Wiley Blackwell Publishing
Russell, N., Thomas, E., Sridhar, N., (2001) Consumer Responses to Negative Word-of-
Mouth Communication: An Attribution Theory Perspective, 11(1), 57-73.
https://www.jstor.org/stable /14880311
Beyens, I., Loes, P., Dreil, I., Keijsers, L., Valkenburg, P., (2020) The effect of social
media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent, 10(1),
www.proquest.com/DOI:10.1038/s41598-020-67727-7
