Social Perception and Attribution

• The study notes cover social perception and attribution, including social psychology definitions, principles, cues, and attribution theories.

Definition of Social Psychology

• An attempt to understand and explain how individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the presence (actual, imagined, or implied) of others.
• Uses scientific methods.
• It underpins various fields such as health, law, consumer behavior, environmental behavior, and organizational work.
• It involves thinking and feeling about oneself, others, things, and themes.
• It informs behaviors like joining groups, helping, hurting, loving, working, and buying.

Two Core Principles

• The significant impact of the situation where behavior is a function of both the person and the situation.
• The subjective construction of social reality, implying that the subjective interpretation of a situation can vary, even if the objective situation is the same with the example of interpreting a kiss on the cheek.

Social Psychology in Relation to Other Psychological Sub-Disciplines

• Social Psychology: Studies thinking, feeling, and acting as a function of the person and the situation.
• Personality Psychology: Focuses on stable differences between individuals.
• Developmental Psychology: Studies changes across the lifespan.
• General Psychology: Examines general thought processes like memory, attention, motivation, and emotion.
• Biological Psychology: Focuses on the brain, nervous system, and body.
• Organizational Psychology: Studies experiences and behaviors in organizations.
• Sociology: Overlaps in themes but focuses on societies and groups.

Process of Social Perception

• Input: Information gathered about a person.
• Information processing occurs in a "black box."
• Output: Impression and judgment.

Cues Utilized in Social Perception

• Nonverbal cues, including:
  • Facial expressions and gestures.
• Paraverbal cues like:
  • Voice and speech manner determine speaker certainty and emotional state.
• Physical appearance cues, including:
  • Facial features.
  • Clothing and posture can denote confidence or social standing.
• "Thin slices" can effectively predict traits:
  • Brief observations can lead to accurate, initial impressions.
  • Faces are linked to political attitudes and sexual promiscuity.
• Communication style cues:
  • Eye contact and interpersonal space.
• Personal environment is also informative as:
  • Offices or living space can hint at personality traits.

Thin Slices

• Defined as brief excerpts of behavior that can facilitate conclusions.
• Developed by Nalini Ambady.
• Features:
  • Short excerpts of behavior include facial expressions, gestures, speech, and tone of voice.
  • Allows for inferences about emotional states and personality traits.
  • Correlates with both informed judgments and with objective measures.
• Effective in judging clearly observable qualities and high emotional affect.
• Interpersonal warmth is well-judged with thin slices, unlike analytical thinking.
• Key Studies:
  • Ambady et al. (2000) and Todorov et al. (2015).

Experiment with Thin Slices: Faces and Political Attitudes

• Explored whether people could determine political stances from minimal information.
• Swiss politicians' photographs were used.
• The predictor was the assessment of political attitude.
• Voting behavior in the Swiss Parliament was the criterion.
• Strong correlations were found between evaluations and objective criteria.

Experiment on Faces and Sexual Promiscuity

• Mixed faces were created, with one side sourced from individuals considered sexually promiscuous.
• Participants accurately chose the more promiscuous-attributed faces.
• Those faces were rated as more attractive and preferred as a partner.

Experiment Assessing Personal Space

• Gosling's experiment examined an environment as a cue.
• Process:
  • Observers viewed the private rooms of strangers.
  • Observers rated the personality of the room's occupant.
  • Occupants rated their own personality.
  • Friends of the occupants rated the occupant's personality.
  • Coders categorized the contents of the room.
• Focused on whether personality is reflected in the room, if observers use the room to assess personality, and if these assessments correlate with actual traits.

Barriers to Accurate Decoding

• Contradictory cues:
• Mixture of affection displayed in facial expressions.
• Inconsistent mimicry and gestures.
• The conscious hiding of true emotions and cultural guidelines may distort true expression of feeling. -Self-presentation tendencies may cause some to present a biased version of themselves to others.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• When expectations influence behavior to align with those expectations.
• Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid (1977) study.
• "What is beautiful is good" expectation.
• Male participants spoke on the phone with women either labeled as attractive or unattractive.
• Results:
  • Men behaved according to their expectations, which influenced the women to behave in ways that confirmed those expectations.

Attributions

• Searching for explanations of why something happened.
• Applied often in unexpected or negative situations.
• Focuses on explaining why certain events occur or fail to occur.
• Making the world predictable, controllable, and more comfortable.
• Attribution answers "why did something happen?".

Attribution Theories

• People spontaneously seek explanations for events, particularly unexpected or adverse ones.
• Focus on explaining the occurrence or absence of events.
• Attribution makes the world more predictable and controllable.
• Attribution is the search for a cause:
  • Impacting how future situations will be attributed.
• Fritz Heider's Naive Action Analysis:
  • Determines if a behavior is due to the individual or the environment.
  • Internal attributions are common, viewing behavior as stemming from internal characteristics over situational context.
  • Attributions inform predictions of future behavior.

Attribution of Success and Failure

• Three dimensions of attribution include:
• Location: internal versus external factors.
• Stability: stable versus variable causes.
• Controllability: controllable versus uncontrollable elements.
• Attributions can affect future expectations, motivation, and emotions.

Application: The Development of Depression

• Learned Helplessness Theory from Abramson et al. (1978).
• Depressive symptoms may come from:
  • Attributional patterns of negative events, that are internal, stable, and global.
• A belief that individual actions cannot improve a situation, thus leading to depressive symptoms.

Application: Attributions & Relationship Satisfaction

• Partnership satisfaction is impacted by partner attributions and effects on their quality.
  • Undesired behavior attributed to negative intent diminishes relationship satisfaction.
  • Desired behavior attributed to egoism decreases satisfaction.
• Studies show effects on relationship satisfaction over the long run.

Self-Serving Attributions

• Attributional patterns in cases of success/failure are skewed by situation.
• Findings from a meta-analysis by Mezulis et al. (2004):
  • People tend to attribute positive events to internal, stable, and global factors, and negative events to external factors.
  • Depressed individuals and those from Asian cultures are less likely to engage in this attribution style.

Group-Serving Biases

• Positive behaviors of the in-group are attributed internally; negative ones are attributed externally.
• Positive behaviors of the out-group are attributed externally; negative ones are attributed internally.

Harold Kelley's Covariation Model

• Used to attribute causality to either a person, object, or situation.
• To attribute causes, individuals should ask three questions:
  • Consensus: Do others behave similarly in the same situation?
  • Distinctiveness: Does this behavior occur only in this situation, or in many situations?
  • Consistency: Does this behavior occur repeatedly in this situation over time?
• Covariation Principle applies:
  • An event is attributed to the variable it correlates.
• Causality can be attributed if all three dimensions of information are present.
• Data patterns include:
  • Consensus: everyone acts the same way.
  • Distinctiveness: variation across entities.
  • Consistency: repeated behavior across situations/time.

Critiques of Covariation Model

• The model has had good support under limited situations.
• High need for cognitive capacity and motivation.
• Relevant information is often missing, leading to potentially biased gap-filling.

Attributional Errors and Sources

• Frequent factors:
  • Inadequate information is common.
  • Information is not always processed.
  • Attribution can be affected by pre-existing knowledge and expectations, learned attribution styles, and contextual variables.

Attributional Biases

• Systematic distortions in identifying causes.
  • Correspondence bias is a tendency to draw conclusions about a person's characteristics based on observed behaviors, even when circumstances would explain the behavior.
• Actor-Observer Difference:
  • Differences in causes attributed to the actors is external while the observer is internal.
• False Consensus Effect:
  • Overestimating the degree to which others share one's own opinions and behaviors.

Correspondence Bias

• It is the fundamental attribution error.
• Involves explaining behavior based on stable traits.
  • It includes the relation between observed characteristic and an assumed one.
  • It overlooks the impacts of external situational factors.
• Demonstrated in Jones and Harris's 1967 study.
• Participants read an essay about Fidel Castro.
• The essays were either pro-Castro or anti-Castro.
• The essays were either written freely, or assigned.
• Participants rated the writer's view on Castro, despite the assigned stance.

Causes of Correspondence Bias

• Motivational: control and prediction of behaviors.
• Situational influences are difficult to discern.
• Preconceived expectations can skew reality.

Two Stages of Attribution

• Step 1: Automatic internal attribution quickly.
  • It can provide bias for the remainder of process.
• Step 2: Accounting for the situation is slower.
  • It may not be comprehensive and necessitates conscious.
• Thoughtful awareness or motivation.

Actor-Observer Bias

• Differences in attributions between the person performing the action and the one observing.
• Causes, according to the actors are more external while the observer is internal.
• Potential Explanations:
  • Those involved know more about themselves, their consistency, and uniqueness.
  • Actors perceive the situation as key, whereas observers focus on individuals and a desire to anticipate those who act.

False Consensus Bias

• Believing individual actions are common, assuming that others think similarly.

Salience

• The importance of a stimulus.
• The prominence of an event, thing, or person.