Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Chapter 4 Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People “Things are seldom as they

Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Chapter 4

Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People

“Things are seldom as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.”

– W. S. Gilbert


Other people are not easy to figure out. Why are they the way they are? Why do they do what they do?


Social Perception

Social Perception


Nonverbal Behavior

• What do we know about people when we first meet them?

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal cues include:


Nonverbal Behavior

• We have a special kind of brain cell called __________.

• Nonverbal cues serve many functions in communication.


Facial Expressions of Emotion

Are facial expressions of emotion universal?

Decoding facial expressions accurately is complicated

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Culture and the Channelsof Nonverbal Communication

Display rules


Emblems are not universal.

Emblems

Culture and the Channelsof Nonverbal Communication


Gender and Nonverbal Communication

In general, women are better at encoding and decoding nonverbal cues.


Implicit Personality Theory

Implicit Personality Theories: Filling in the Blanks


Culture and ImplicitPersonality Theories

These general notions, or schemas, are shared by people in a culture, and are passed from one generation to another.

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Culture and ImplicitPersonality Theories

In Western cultures

The Chinese


Causal Attribution: Answering the “Why” QuestionAccording to attribution theory,

This helps us understand and predict our social world.


The Nature of the Attribution Process

Heider discussed what he called “naive” or “commonsense” psychology.


The Nature of the Attribution Process

When trying to decide what causes people’s behavior, we can make one of two attributions:


The Covariation Model: Internal versus External Attributions

We notice and think about more than one piece of information when we form an impression of another person.

Covariation Model

It examines how the perceiver chooses either an internal or an external attribution.


The Correspondence Bias: People as Personality Psychologists

One common shortcut is the correspondence bias:


The Correspondence Bias: People as Personality Psychologists

We can’t see the situation, so we ignore its importance.

Perceptual Salience


The Two-Step Process

In sum, we go through a two-step process when we make attributions.

Why?


People from individualistic and collectivistic cultures both demonstrate the correspondence bias.

Culture and the Correspondence Bias


The Actor/Observer Difference

The actor-observer difference is an amplification of the correspondence bias:


Self-Serving Attributions


Defensive Attributions




Why do we make self-serving attributions?


Culture and OtherAttributional Biases

There is some evidence for cross-cultural differences in the Actor-Observer Effect and in Self-Serving and Defensive Attributions.


How Accurate Are Our Attributions and Impressions?

Our impressions are sometimes wrong because of the mental shortcuts we use when forming social judgments.

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Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Chapter 4 Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People “Things are seldom as they