PBL 2: You Be The Judge PDF

Learning goals: - How are first impressions formed? - What is attribution? - What errors can we make while attributing? *Kassin, S., & Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2014). Social Psychology (9th ed.). Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. Chapter 4.* I. Observation: The Elements of Social Perception...

Learning goals: - How are first impressions formed? - What is attribution? - What errors can we make while attributing? *Kassin, S., & Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2014). Social Psychology (9th ed.). Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. Chapter 4.* I. Observation: The Elements of Social Perception What kind of evidence do we use to understand others. 3 sources: persons, situation, and behaviour **A person's physical appearance** People evaluate spontaneously and unconsciously whether a person is dominant/submissive or un/trustworthy based on their physical appearance Where does these assumptions come from? - Programmed by evolution to respond kindly to infant features these features are associated with helplessness and inspire kindness (even when the subject is an adult) - Focusing on expressions of happiness and anger trustworthy linked with happiness, safe to approach and untrustworthy linked with anger, signals danger **Perception of situation** We also have preset notions of each type of situation -- "scripts" that predict the outcome. They are influenced by tipical formalities (ex: polite in an intervieuw or playful at a picnic) Context influence the perception of facial expression. These scripts guide our interpretation of behaviour. **Behavioural evidence** Essential step in social perception recognizing what a person is doing at a given moment Mind persception: the process by which we attribute humanlike mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other human. People perceive minds along two dimentsions: - Agency ability to target, plan, execute - Experience ability to feel pleasure, pain The more "mind" we attribute the more we feel kindly about something The closer we are to a person the more "mind" qualities we attribute The silent language of non-verbal Behaviour: Behavioural cues are used to determine a person's action but also inner state. When people hide their emotion we try to read through their nonverbal behaviour. What cues? - Facial expression - Eye-contact/gaze - Touch indicator There are different manners in different cultures. **Distinguishing Truth from Deception** Can you tell when someone is lying ? The cues are easier to find on bodies' movement than facial II. Attribution from elements To understand people well enough to predict their future behaviour, we also identify their inner dispositions -- stable characteristics such as personality traits, abilities, attitudes. We infer them from what a person says or does. What are the process that lead us to make this inferences? **Attribution Theories** Heider. The explanation we come up with while trying to a person's behaviour are attributions. The explanation we give are given in 2 categories: - Personal attribution - Situational attribution The purpose is not to understand the true causes but the persons perception of causality For personal attribution Jones's Correspondent Inference Theory: People try to understand from an action whether the acts corresponds to an enduring personal trait. To do that, people make inferences on the basis of 3 factors: - Degree of choice free will or coercion - Expectedness of behaviour an action tell me more about a person if it departs from the norm - Intended effect or consequences an act that produces lany enjoyable outcom will provide you with less information on the cause of somoene's action than an actthat has only one desirable outcome Kelley's covariation Theory For situational attribution Covariation principle: In order for something to be the cause of a behaviour, it must be present when the behaviour occurs and absent when it does not Three kinds of covariation information in particular are useful: - Consensus: see how different a person's react to the same stimulus - Distinctiveness: how the same person reacts to different stimulus - Consistency: what happens at another time when person and stimulus remain the same Differences between people attributing: - Vary in extend to which they believe that human behaviors are caused by personal characteristics that are fixed or by characteristic that are malleable - Some people are more prone then others to process new information in ways that are colored by self-serving motives **Attribution biases:** Shortcuts and bias made by the brain during attribution: - Cognitive Heuristics= information-processing rule of thumb (règles empirique) that enables us to think in ways that are quick and easy. Availability heuristic = a tendency to estimate the odds that an event will occur by how easily instances of it pops in mind. Errors: - False consensus effect: overestimation of the extent to which people share our opinions - Base rate fallacy: the fact that people are relatively insensitive to numerical base-rate but more to dramatic and graphic events leads to misperception of risks - Counterfactual thinking = a tendency to imagine alternative out- comes that might have occurred but did not. - The fundamental attribution error = When people explain the behavior of others, they tend to overestimate the role of personal factors and over- look the impact of situations. **Culture and attribution:** Lee Whorf (1956) theorized that the language people speak---the words, the rules, and so on---can influence the way they conceptualize the world. Ex: the Hanunoo of the Philippines have 92 different terms for rice, in contrast to the crude distinction North Americans make between "white rice" and "brown rice." Just as culture influences the way we perceive the physical world, so it also influences the way we view individuals and their place in the social world around them. Consider the contrasting orientations between Western "individualist" cultures and non-Western "collectivist" cultures it possible that the fundamental attribution error is a uniquely West- ern phenomenon? American participants made more personal attributions, while the Indians made more situational attributions. Cultural differences in attribution are founded on varying folk theories about human causality. Western cultures, they note, emphasize the individual person and his or her attributes, whereas East Asian cultures focus on the background or field that surrounds that person. **Motivational Biases:** As objective as we try to be, our social perceptions are sometimes colored by personal needs, wishes, and preferences. - Wishful seeing. Ex: Emily Balcetis and David Dunning (2006) showed stimuli like this one to college students who thought that they were participating in a taste-testing experiment. The students were told that they would be randomly assigned to taste either freshly squeezed orange juice or a greenish, foul-smelling "organic" drink---depending on whether a letter or a number was flashed on a laptop computer. For those told that a letter would assign them to the orange juice condition, 72% saw the letter B. For those told that a number would assign them to the orange juice, 61% saw the number 13. - Need for self-esteem: people tend to take more credit for success than blame for failure. Similarly, people seek more information about their strengths than about weaknesses. - Linked to the false-consensus: it seems that we overestimate the extent to which others think, feel, and behave as we do. - The need for self-esteem can bias social perceptions even when we don't realize that the self is implicated. We think that our skills are the most needed in a company for example. - *Ideological motives* can color our attributions for the behavior of others. Ex: In the US, political conservatives blame poverty, crime... on an "underclass" of people who are uneducated, immoral, lazy, or self-indulgent; in contrast, liberals often attribute these same problems to social and economic institutions that favor powerful groups over others. - Beliefs in a just world: people need to view the world as a just place in which we "get what we deserve" and "deserve what we get"---a world where hard work and clean living always pay off and where laziness and a sinful lifestyle are punished. How does it influence our perception of others? : If people cannot help or compensate the victims of misfortune, they turn on them. Cause: the fundamental attribution error and when we feel threatened. III. **Integration: From Dispositions to Impressions** Personal attributions often lead us to infer that a person has a certain disposition. But, one trait does not make a person. To have a complete picture of someone, social perceivers must assemble the various bits and pieces into a unified impression. - **information integration: the arithmetic;** the process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression; information integration theory (impressions are based on perceiver dispositions and a weighted average of a target person's trait) - **deviations from the arithmetic: ** - *perceiver characteristics:* some people measure others with an intellectual yardstick, others look for physician beauty, a warm smile → each of us is more likely to notice and recall certain traits than others; part of the reason for differences among perceivers is that we tend to use ourselves as a standard, or frame of reference, when evaluating others - a perceiver's current mood state can also influence the impressions formed of others - *priming effects:* impression formation is the eye of the beholder; tendency for recently used or perceived words or ideas to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information, adaptive social mechanism that helps us to prepare for upcoming encounters with a primed target - *target characteristics:* individuals can reliably be distinguished from one another along five board traits or factors; extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness and consciousness; we form more extreme impressions of a person who is said to be dishonest than of one who is said to be honest; the impact of trait information on our impressions of other people depends not only on characteristics of the perceiver and target but on context as well (implicit theories of personality and the order in which we receive info about one trait relative to other traits) - [implicit personality theories]: network of assumptions people make about the relationships among traits and behaviors /// central traits exert a powerful influence on overall impressions - [the primacy effect:] tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact o n impressions than information presented later → once perceivers think they have formed an accurate impression of someone, they tend to pay less attention to subsequent information. individuals differ in their need for closure, the desire to reduce cognitive uncertainty, which heightens the importance of first impressions IV. Confirmation biases from perception to reality. - Once an impression is formed, people become less likely to change their minds when confronted with non-supportive evidence. - People tend to interpret, seek, and create information in ways that confirm existing beliefs. **Perseverance of Beliefs** - First impressions may survive in the face of inconsistent information. - Ambiguous evidence is interpreted in ways that bolster first impressions. - The effect of evidence that is later discredited perseveres because people formulate theories to support their initial beliefs. **Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing** - Once perceivers have beliefs about someone, they seek further information in ways that confirm those beliefs. **The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy** - As shown by the effects of teacher expectancies on student achievement, first impressions set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. - This is the product of a three-step process: (1) A perceiver forms an expectation of a target person; (2) the perceiver behaves accordingly; and (3) the target adjusts to the perceiver's actions. - This self-fulfilling prophecy effect is powerful but limited in important ways. *Bacev-Giles, C., & Haji, R. (2017). Online first impressions: Person perception in social media profiles. Computer in Human Behaviour, 75, 50-57.*