May 24 2012
Person Perception and Social Interaction
Readings- (CH. 4)pp. 96- 122 and blackboard readings
- What is person perception – is a whole defined as how do we think of other people, perceive
and interpret people -
- Person perception come from observing behaviour
- Verbal behavior – what we say to others – “your outfit is really nice” – intepretated as a
compliment
- Non-verbal behavior - emblems and
- Emblems (non-linguistic forms of verbal behavior but are sub characterized under non-verbal)
– gestures that have well understood meaning within a culture e.g. peace sign, thumbs up etc
- Research on thin slices – approach within social psych focused of the attributional power of
brief exposure to others
- Show images really fast (e.g. face) – detecting things simply from seeing a quick image
- SES (socio-economic status) In social interactions – they had people interact with other people
(which was videotaped) the videotape was shown to another set of participants who were
asked to predict there SES
- People low in SES tend to move less and are better focused compare to high SES
- Results – people were able to accurately detect parents income, mothers education and
subjective SES (simply by watching the 30 sec clip)
- People who are high in SES tend to groom themselves more, doodle, manipulating objects –
playing with their cell phones and were less focused
- Context (situation) - what we get from ones behaviour depends on the situation that surrounds
the situation (a picture of someone crying vs. a picture of someone crying because she won a
gold metal)
- Context provides more information and can completely change attribution for what somebody
is doing or saying
- Schemas –are a set of expectations you have for any person, thing or situation
- Attribution – an explanation for an observed behaviour of a social object (explanation cans be
made both other people and are own behaviour)
- Attribution are automatic – attributing behaviour to what we see
- Neo-cortex – pattern matching
- Internal attribution – attributing a person’s behaviour to something intrinsic to that person –
behaviour caused by her internal self – personality, values, character, attitude
- External attribution – attributing a person’s behaviour to something about the situation in
which the behaviour occurred
- Specifically not changing beliefs regarding person’s character or personality but rather a result
of the situation
- Correspondence bias – tendency to infer that a person’s behaviour corresponds to their
disposition, personality or attitude
- Internal attributes = other people
- External attributes = used for our own behaviour
- Fundamental attribution error - When perceiving others, you analyze their behaviour internally
whereas when perceiving our own behaviour we tend use external attributes - Study Jones & Tarris - 1. Assigned to read an essay on favor on Castro or against Castro 2. Two
conditions- people are told that the author of the essay was A. assigned a position (pro-or anti
Castro) or B. authors choose the side they wanted to write about
- Results – see slides (graph) in short, we underestimate the role of external causes when
interpreting other people behaviour
Explanations for the fae -
- Perceptual salience – tendency to overestimate the casual role of information that grabs
attention
- The thing/person/act you pay attention too is what your assigning the cause too – “individual is
causing the behaviour”
- Why don’t we attribute our own behaviour internally? Because, we pay attention to everything
outside of yourself (as you cannot see yourself)
- TWO STEP PROCESS OF ATTRUBUTION – 1. Make an internal attribution 2. Attempt to adjust
away from internal attribution by considering situational constraints
- Fundamental attribution error – may differ culturally
- Study – Gang Lu – Recent Physics PH.D from University of Lowa who believed he should of won
this prestigious award however, someone else won it. As a result, he killed 4 faculty members
including the other Ph.D student who won the award
- In east Asian cultures people take the external factors of people’s behaviour rather than
internal attributes
- The Gang Lu event was perceived differently in English and Chinese newspaper
- In the English newspapers Gang Lu was expressed via internal attributes whereas the Chinese
newspaper expressed Gang Lu externally
Co-variation theory
- Assumption – people are lay statisticians (not professional, do analyses in your head)
- 3 factors of attribution - consensus, distinctiveness and consistency
- Consensus – does this other person behave in this way always? Behaviour unique to person
- Distinctiveness- does
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