Social - Person Perception PDF

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How we perceive and judge people in a social context ...

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Person Perception Definitions and questions Person perception: The way we form judgements about other people – based on what we attend to, perceive and remember about others How do we process the ‘raw data’ to form impressions? How accurate are our impressions? (Actually very inaccurate). How do stimuli relate to behaviour? How do we form impressions? 

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Implicit personality theory: A schema that people use to group various types of traits together to make judgements on others. These schema are too general and affected by culture Attribution process: Makes appraisals about a person based on situations and behaviour

Attribution Process 

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Attribution theory: Focusses on how we explain the causes of our own and other people’s behaviour o Internal attribution: Due to person (e.g. attitude, personality). Assumes that the person would behave in the same way across all situations o External attribution: Due to situation. Assumes that most people would behave in the same way in a given situation Why do we make trait attributions for others? o Correspondence bias: Tendency to infer that people’s behaviour corresponds to their disposition o Fundamental attribution error: Tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behaviour is due to internal factors and underestimate the role of the situation. E.g. Castro study (Jones & Harris, 1967):  Asked students to read an essay supporting or opposing Castro  Condition 1 (choice): The essay writer was free to choose their own opinion on Castro  Condition 2 (no choice): The essay writer was randomly assigned a position on Castro  Students asked what the essay writer’s opinion on Castro was (in favour or against)  Condition 1: Students gave ‘correct’ answer – rated the essay writers who spoke in favour of Castro as having a positive opinion on him and vice versa  Condition 2: Students gave ‘wrong’ answer – rated essay writers who spoke in favour of Castro as having a positive opinion on him even though they knew the essay writers had been randomly assigned to be in favour or against Castro  Students did not take into account the influence of the situational constraints on the essay writers and attributed sincere beliefs to the writers as predicted by the fundamental attribution error

Kelly’s Covariation Model (1967 & 1971) 

We systematically observe the link between possible causal factors and behaviour of a person to form an attribution on that person by asking questions: o Consensus info: How does the behaviour vary across people? o Consistency info: How does the behaviour vary across time and settings? o Distinctiveness info: How does the behaviour vary across targets/people?

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An example: Marco asks Bino for some clarification about a lecture and Bino says no! o Consensus info: Do others help Marco? o Consistency info: Does Bino always say no to Marco’s requests? o Distinctiveness info: Does Bino always say no to others’ requests?  Answers help in determining if internal or external reasons are causing Bino’s behaviour – know which patterns produce internal and external attributions

Perceptual Salience: What is the focus of people’s attention? 

Chair study: There are two actors given a pre-prepared script that features equal contributions from both actor A and B – they face each other as they read the script. There are four participants. 2x observer A’s face actor A and vice versa for B. Observer A’s believed that actor A contributed more/played the biggest role because they faced actor A and observer B’s believed that actor B contributed more because they faced actor B

Can people take external factors (the situation) into account instead of internal factors (personality), and when? 

Attribution process: o Make internal attribution o If there is time, energy and motivation, then the attribution is adjusted and the situation is taken into account  If cognitively busy or distracted, people are less likely to reach this second stage and simply take internal factors into account

Anderson’s (1981) ‘Cognitive Algebra’ Model   

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Additive model: Sum of ratings of all attributes – assigns positive and negative values to attributes Averaging model: Average of the ratings for each trait Processing information: o Evaluation: Considering the positive and negative aspects of a person to come to a conclusion about whether you like them or not Used more broadly to assess how people judge – the evaluation process

Processing information 

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Categorisation: Viewing individuals as members of groups rather than on the basis of a unique set of attributes o Categories are often broad and inaccurate Schema: o Mental structures or framework which allows us to organise a mass of diverse information o Stable and persistent o Prototype: An idea abstract of the schema used to draw inferences about a person o Stereotype: Beliefs about typical characteristics of members of a group

Fiske & Neuberg’s Continuum model (1990)   

Category-based processes: Instinctive automatic first impression and categorisation – is spontaneous Attribute-focused processes: Impression obtained following additional information Model holds for verbal and non-verbal information

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READING: Hogg & Vaugan chapter 2 A short history of cognition in social psychology    

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Behaviourism (Skinner, Thorndike, Watson, 1960s): Emphasis on understanding observable behaviour in terms of reinforcement in schedules Gestalt psychology: Perspective in which the whole influences constituent parts rather than vice versa Cognitive consistency: A model of social cognition in which people try to reduce inconsistency among their cognitions, because they find inconsistency unpleasant Naïve psychologist model (early 1970s): Model of social cognition that characterises people as using rational, scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to understand their world Attribution: The process of assigning a cause to our own behaviour and that of others

Forming impression of other people Asch’s configural model: Gestalt-based model of impression formation, in which central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final impression 

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Central traits: We latch onto certain pieces of information/traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration of final impressions. They influence the meanings of other traits and the perceived relationship among traits – they are responsible for the integrated configuration of the impression Peripheral traits: Traits that have an insignificant influence on the configuration of final impressions Asch (1946): Presented participants with a 7-trait description of a hypothetical person in which either the word ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, or ‘polite’ or ‘blunt’ appeared. The percentage of participants assigning other traits to the target was markedly affected when ‘warm’ as replaced by ‘cold’ but now when ‘polite’ was replaced with ‘blunt’ o Warm/cold is a central trait dimension that has more influence on impression formation than polite/blunt, which is a peripheral trait dimension

Biases in forming impressions Primacy & recency  

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The order in which information about a person is presented has an effect on impression Primacy effect: The traits presented first disproportionately influenced the final impression, so that the person was evaluated more favourably when positive information was presented first than when negative information was presented first. Early information could act as central cues, or people pay more attention to earlier information. Primary effects are more common than recency effects Recency effect: Emerges when later information has more impact than earlier information. This can happen when distracted (e.g. overworked, bombarded, tired) or when having little motivation to attend to someone

Positivity & negativity  

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In the absence of information to the contrary, people tend to assume the best of others and form positive impressions (Sears, 1983) If there is any negative information, this tends to attract our attention and assume disproportionate significance in the subsequent impression – we are biased towards negativity (Fiske, 1980) Once formed, a negative impression is much more difficult to change

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We may be sensitive in this way to negative information because: o The information is unusual and distinctive when attracts attention o The information indirectly signifies a potential danger, so detection has survival value for the individual and ultimately the species

Stereotypes 

Impressions of people are strongly influenced by widely shapes assumptions about the personalities, attitudes and behaviours of people based on group membership o Stereotypes: Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members

Cognitive algebra 

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Approach to the study of impression formation that focuses on how people combine attributes that have valence into an overall positive or negative impression Impression formation involves the integration of sequential pieces of information about a person into a compete image – the image is general evaluative

Summation 

A method of forming positive or negative impressions by summing the valence of all the constituent person attributes - impressions are the cumulative sum of each piece of information

Averaging 

A method of forming positive or negative impressions by averaging the valence of all the constituent attributes – the overall impression is the cumulative average of each piece of information

Weighted averaging  

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Research favours the averaging model but it has limitations The valence of separate pieces of information may not be fixed but may depend on the context of the impression-formation task. Context may also influence the relative importance of pieces of information and thus weight them in different ways in the impression Method of forming positive or negative impressions by first weighting them and then averaging the valence of all the constituent person attributes If the person was being weighted as a potential friend compared to a potential politician, the weightings would be very different Seems to allow for central traits

Schemas 

Schema: Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes (Friske & Taylor, 1991). It is a set of interrelated cognitions that allows us quickly to make sense of a person, situation, event on place on the basis of limited information. Certain cues activate a schema and the schema than fills in the missing details o Schemas facilitate top-down, concept/theory-driven processing (fill in gaps with prior knowledge and preconceptions) rather than using bottom-up,

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data-driven processing (seeking information directly from the immediate context)

Categorisation and stereotyping 

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Stereotypes are widely shared generalisations about members of a social group. Usually simplified images and derogatory when applied to outgroups. Based on/create visible differences between groups Lippman (1922): Stereotypes are simplified mental images that act as templates to help to interpret the bewildering diversity of the social world. Research aimed at describing the content and form of stereotypes have produced clear findings: o People show an easy readiness to characterise large human groups in terms of a few fairly crude common attributes o Stereotypes are slow to change o Stereotype change is generally in response to wider social, political or economic changes o Stereotypes are acquired at an early age o Stereotypes become more pronounced and hostile when social tensions and conflict exist between groups, and then they are extremely different to modify o Stereotypes are not inaccurate or wrong but rather serve to make sense of particular intergroup relations Accentuation principle (Tajfel, 1957; 1950): Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with the categorisation. The effect is amplified where the categorisation and dimension has subjective importance, relevance or value. A number of experiments with physical and social stimuli have confirmed this: o The categorisation of stimuli produces a perceptual accentuation of intracategory similarities, and inter-category differences on dimensions believed to be correlated with the categorisation o The accentuation effect is enhanced where the categorisation has importance, relevance or value to the participant The principle lies at the core of Tajfel’s work on intergroup relations and group membership, which has developed the theories of Turner o Social identity theory: Theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-categorisation, social comparison and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties o Self-categorisation theory: How the process of categorising oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and intergroup behaviours

Social encoding and salience 

External social stimuli are represented in the mind. Bargh (1984) describes the stages: 1. Pre-attentive analysis: a general, automatic and non-conscious scanning of the environment 2. Focal attention: once noticed, stimuli are consciously identified and categorised 3. Comprehension: stimuli are given semantic meaning 4. Elaborative reasoning: the semantically represented stimulus is linked to other knowledge to allow for complex inferences

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The process of social encoding depends on what is salient: property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli. People can be salient because: o They are novel (single man, pregnant woman) or figural (bright clothes) in the immediate context (McArthur & Post, 1977) o They are behaving in ways that do not fit prior to expectations of them as individuals, as members of a particular social category or as people in general (Jones & McGillis, 1976) o They are important to your specific or more general goals, they dominate your visual field, or you have been told to pay attention to them (Taylor & Fiske, 1975)

Person memory 

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Associative network/propositional model (Anderson, 1990): Model of memory in which nodes of ideas are connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread o We store propositions that consist of nodes of ideas (e.g. book, student, ponytail) that are linked by relationship between ideas. The links are associative in so far as nodes are associated with other nodes (e.g. student and ponytail) but some associative links are stronger than others. Links become strengthened the more they are activated by cognitive rehearsal (e.g. recalling or thinking about the propositions) This theory is relevant to person memory in that information that is inconsistent with our general impression of someone is generally better recalled than impression-consistent information – inconsistent information attracts attention and generates more cognition, thus strengthening links and retrieval cues

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