Social Cognition and Perception

Social Cognition and Perception: refers tothe mental processes that help us to collectand remember information about others, and toform beliefs and attitudes and make judgmentsbased on that information.

In our social world, we do not respond toobjective reality. Rather, we respond to oursubjective interpretations of reality.

I. Impressions

A. Impression Management: our efforts to produce a favorablefirst impression on other people.

B. Tactics of impression management success…

C. Impression Formation: refers to the process through whichwe form an impression of another person or group of people.

1) Self-Enhancement: attempts to boost our own image.

2) Other-Enhancement: attempts to make the other person feel good.

D. Do you think that first impressions really are all thatimportant?

E. Asch’s Research on Central and Peripheral Traits

F. Priming: activating particular associations in memory.

G. Interpersonal Primacy Effect: the first information learnedabout someone will be a more powerful influence on ourperceptions than any later information will be.

H. Halo Effect: A liked person is assumed to have many othergood qualities.

I. Horn Effect: A disliked person is assumed to have manyother bad qualities.

II. Nonverbal Communication: the way inwhich people communicate, intentionally orunintentionally, without words.

A. Facial Expressions

1) Six Basic Emotions/Facial Expressions…

Happiness

Sadness

Fear

Disgust

Anger

Surprise

B. Eye Contact (gazes and stares)

C. Bodily Movements

1) Body Language: the position, posture, or movementsof our bodies.

2) Emblems: nonverbal gestures that have well-understooddefinitions within a given culture; they usually havedirect verbal translations, like the “OK” sign.

D. Touching

E. Nonverbal Cues and Deception

1) Micro-expressions: brief and involuntary expressionsof emotion (like fear and anger).

F. Electronic Communication

A. Belief Perseverance: persistence of one’s initial conceptions even though the basis for one’s belief is discredited. Yet, an explanation of why the belief might be true survives and continues to influence one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

III. Other Factors Related to Impressions

B. Reconstructing The Past

1) False Memory: a report that an individual believes to be amemory but that does not correspond to actual events.

2) Misinformation effect: incorporating “misinformation” intoone’s memory of the event after witnessing an event andreceiving misleading information about it.

C. Reconstructing Past Attitudes

1) The Asparagus Effect!

2) Rosy Retrospection: people often recall mildly pleasantevents more favorably than they actually experienced them.

D. Reconstructing Past Behavior

1) The Teeth Brushing Effect!

IV. Judging our Social Worlds

A. Controlled Processing: explicit thinking that is deliberate,reflective, and conscious.

B. Automatic Processing: implicit thinking that is effortless,habitual, and without awareness (a.k.a. intuition).

C. Overconfidence Phenomenon: the tendency to be moreconfident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy ofone’s beliefs.

D. Confirmation Bias: the tendency to search for informationthat confirms one’s preconceptions.

1) Self-Verification Theory: people seek, elicit, and recallfeedback that confirms their beliefs about themselves.

E. Heuristics: mental shortcuts.

F. Representativeness Heuristic: the tendency to presume,sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or somethingbelongs to a particular group if resembling (representing)a typical member.

1) Base-Rate Information: the data about the frequencyor probability of a given item or event.

G. Availability Heuristic: the strategy of assuming that howeasily one can remember examples of something is anindicator of how common that thing actually is.

H. Counterfactual Thinking: imagining alternative scenariosand outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t. The morelikely that an alternative scenario or outcome may haveoccurred, the more likely one will engage in this type of thinking.

V. Attributions

A. Attribution Theory: the theory of how we explain thebehavior of other individuals; by attributing the behavior tointernal dispositions or to external situations.

1) Internal Attributions: explanations based on anindividual’s perceived stable characteristics, such asattitudes, personality traits, or abilities.

2) External Attributions: explanations based on the currentsituation and events that would influence all people.

1) Consistency Information: how the person’s behavior varies over timein a given situation.

2) Distinctiveness: how the person’s behavior varies between situations.

3) Consensus Information: how others behave similarly in this situation.

B. Kelley’s Attribution Model

C. Spontaneous Trait Inference: an effortless, automaticinference of a trait immediately after exposure to someone’sbehavior.

D. Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency for observersto underestimate situational influences and overestimatedispositional influences upon the behavior of other individuals.

E. Actor-Observer Effect: the tendency to make externalattributions for our own behaviors and internal ones for thebehavior of others.

F. Objective Self-Awareness: a self-conscious state in whichattention focuses on oneself as an object in the environment.

VI. Expectations

A. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy…

The case whereby people…

1) Have an expectation about what another person islike, which…

2) influences how they act toward that person, which…

3) causes that person to behave consistently withpeople’s original expectations, making the expectationscome true.

B. Rosenthal’s Research on Teacher Expectations…

Teachers led to believe particular students willbloom:

1) Create a warmer emotional climate for thosestudents, giving them more personal attention,encouragement, and support,

2) Give “bloomers” more challenging material,

3) Give “bloomers” more and better feedback,

4) Give “bloomers” more opportunities to respond inclass and give them longer to respond.