Social PerceptionThe 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.

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