Social Perception and Non-Verbal Communication

• Social perception refers to the study of how impressions are formed and inferences are made about other people.
• The need to understand and predict our social world is satisfied by the answers to such questions about people.

Non-Verbal Communication

• Nonverbal behavior is how people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without using words.
• Examples of nonverbal behavior include facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position, movement, use of touch, and gaze.

Facial Expressions

• Facial expressions are considered the 'crown jewel' of nonverbal communication given the communicativeness of the human face.
• Encoding is the expression of nonverbal behavior while decoding involves interpreting its meaning.
• An example of encoding is patting someone on the back.
• An example of decoding is deciding whether a pat on the back was an expression of condescension, not kindness.
• Nonverbal communication is species-specific, not cultural-specific, according to Darwin.
• The six major emotional expressions, which are anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness, elicit universal facial expressions.
• Some psychologists believe certain facial expressions have adaptive functions such as fear and disgust having opposite muscle movements.
• Fear enhances perception and facial/eye movements increasing sensory input.
• Disgust decreases perception and facial/eye movements decreasing sensory input.
• Recent studies show evidence that other emotions also have distinct expressions that aren't limited to the face.
• Pride might include expressions like a small smile, a head tilted back slightly, and a visibly expanded chest
• Decoding can be difficult because of affect blends, and display rules.
• Affect blends are facial expressions where one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion.
• Display rules are cultural-specific rules that shape whether one shows particular expressions.

Display Rules Differences

• In America, men are often discouraged from emotional displays like crying, but women are allowed.
• In Japan, women are discouraged from displaying an uninhibited smile.
• Direct eye contact is taken suspciously in America.
• Direct eye contact is considered disrespectful in Nigeria, Puerto Rico, and Thailand.
• In America liking personal space is more common.
• In the Middle East, parts of South America, and southern Europe standing close to each other and touching is more common.

First Impressions

• Initial impressions of people are often based on the slightest cues.
• Initial impressions informed by someone's facial appearance, can take less than 100 milliseconds.
• Character can be inferred from faces in people as young as 3 years old.

Thin-Slicing

• Thin-slicing effects involve drawing conclusions about a person based on an extremely brief sample of behavior.
• Participants rated 3 random 10-second video clips without audio from 12 instructors' lectures and rated how competent, confident, and active the teachers appeared and their judgement was accurate.
• Ratings of the clips were compared with end-of-semester teaching evaluations from real students who spent the whole semesters with them and the correlation was significant.
• In another study where the length of the videos were cut to 6sec, 'thin slice' participants accurately predicted who the highest-rated teachers were.
• This is significant because it goes against the assumption that to know a person, you got to spend time with them.

Lingering Influence of Initial Impressions

• The primacy effect involves the first traits perceived in others influencing how information that we learn about them later is viewed.
• Belief perseverance is the tenancy to stick with an initial judgement even in the face of the new information.

Sobering Implications

• Impressions are formed based on tiny amounts of information.
• These impressions can develop into a schema of the person.
• When the person is seen again, the schema becomes activated and associated thoughts and related behaviors may occur based on those thoughts.
• When making a judgment about the person, heuristics that reinforce the impression might also be applied.
• As a person encounters new information that contradicts the schema, it might be ignored to go with the schema.
• First impressions about other people can automatically judge internal traits and make unwarranted personality judgements.
• This strengthens the schema of the person ensuring that the first impression lasts.

Schemas versus Heuristics

• A schema is an organized network of knowledge that can activate a thought.
• A heuristic is a processing rule, or rule-of-thumb that shapes how you use that thought to make a decision.
• The two may work in opposite directions.

Causal Attribution

• Causal attribution helps people answer the "why" question.
• Two theories of causal attribution are the attribution theory and the covariation model.

Attribution Theory

• Fritz Heider is considered the "father" of attribution theory.
• Attribution theory explains the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behavior.
• Decisions about the causes of behavior can be made based on one of two attributions: internal/dispositional and external/situational attributions.
• An internal attribution means that the cause of one's behavior is due to something about the person like their attitude, character, or personality.
• An external attribution means that the cause of one's behavior is due to something about the situation in which most people would respond the same way.

Effects of Attribution

• Attribution matters in a happy marriage, in which the following behaviors are shown:
• Partner's positive behaviors are attributed to internal attributions and partners negatives behaviours are attributed to external attributions.
• Attribution matters in a distressed marriage, in which the following behaviours are shown:
• Partner's positive behaviors are attributed to external attributions and partner's negative behaviors are attributed to internal attributions.

Covariation Model

• To form an attribution about the cause of a person's behavior, behavior is studied for how it "covaries" across time, actors, and targets.
• In making an internal versus external attribution, three pieces of information are used: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.
• Consensus refers to the extent to which other people display the same behavior toward the same stimulus as the actor.
• Distinctiveness refers to the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli.
• Consistency refers to the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstance.
• internal attribution = low consensus, low distinctiveness, and high consistency
• external attribution= high consensus, high distinctiveness, and high consistency

Fundamental Attribution Error

• The fundamental attribution error refers to the tenancy to make internal attributions for other people's behavior and underestimate the role of situational factors, where the "correspondence bias" may occur .
• People are perceptually focused on, and therefore their behavior can explain our attention.
• Situational factors often may get overlooked seeing as how they are harder to see and describe.
• Study participants read an essay about Fidel Castro and were asked to rate how pro- or anti-Castro the author was.
• The independent variables were whether participants were told if the author freely wrote their position or was assigned to write a particular position, and whether the essay took the position to support versus oppose Castro.
• No-choice authors also incriminated when writing about Castro which goes against the idea that what we chooses reflects our real self.
• The fundamental attribution error occurs because attention is directed towards to person, not the surrounding situation, where the person is "perceptually salient".
• Situational causes are often perceptually invisible, and thus their importance is missed.
• People thought that whatever actor they could see better had more impact on the conversation in studies about this phenomenon.

Two-Step Attribution Process

1. An internal attribution is made, it is assumed that one's person's behavior was due to something about them, and it occurs quickly and spontaneously.
2. An attribution is made, adjusted by acknowledging the situation; this requires effort and conscious attention (which is not always performed), and can result in not enough adjustment in the second step.

• The adjustments during this second step is more lightly to occur, if: you actively slow down to think carefully before reaching a judgment, you are motivated to reach an accurate judgment, and you are suspicious about the behavior being observed (e.g., a suspected lie).

Self-Serving Attributions

• Successes attributed to internal, dispositional factors, and failures attributed to external, situational factors.
• Self-serving attributions can occur because someone may be trying to maintain self-esteem, want other to think well of them and admire them, and/or know more about the situational factors of your own behavior as opposed to anyone else's behavior.
• One's successes are attributed to internal factors and one's failures are attributed to external factors, if they consider themselves to have a happy persona.
• One's successes are attributed to external factors and one's failures are attributed to internal factors, if they consider themselves to have an unhappy persona.
• Research has resulted that, Humans tend to be quite narrow in views when explaining people's behavior.