Perceiving and Evaluating Other People

As intuitive psychologists, people form impressions of others' personalities by observing others' behaviors. In line with Kelley's model, Distinctive behaviors (those that differ most from the way that typical person would behave in similar circumstances) are most informative of personality. Nondistinctive behaviors are more reasonably attributed to the situation than to anything unique about the person. Often, however, people do attribute nondistinctive behaviors to personality.

Social Cognition and Affect

We like to believe that "reality" is out there to be discovered and acted upon rationally. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are constantly "constructing" reality and this construction often changes with our own goals, history, the relationship we're in, etc. We tend to take it for granted that OUR reality is everyone else's. Not necessarily,...

Examples of Reality Construction

The Nacirema (Miner)
Shooting an Elephant (Orwell)

Social Cognition

So, when we speak of "social cognition", we mean: "how we perceive and interpret information about ourselves and others". Information perception and interpretation is affected by the ividness of available information. Vivid information is salient, stands out. We judge event's representativeness by how easy it is to recall or bring other instances to mind. (Welfare mother; car buying examples)

Think of social cognition as our pre-existing schemas (remember Piaget?)

Organized beliefs and knowledge about people, events, objects

Stereotypes are one kind of schema:

Fat people are...?
Baptists are...?
Women are...?
Irish are...?
Military personnel are...?
Attractive people are...?
Non-Mormons are...?

Stereotypes act as expectancies

They govern our perception of the person's subsequent behavior (Snyder example). They govern our own motivation and behavior toward the person. Someone thinks you're smart versus Someone thinks you're stupid. How do they behave toward you?

Examples

Fixed Bowling
Gender and Advertisements

The Person and Situation Biases in Attributions

Social Cognition: Attribution

Attribution = explanation for our own or someone else's behavior

We make attributions about ourselves = Self-Attribution

We make attributions about others = Other-Attributions

Self-Attribution Questions

Why did I fail the exam?
Why am I so fat?

Other-Attribution Questions

Why did John snap at me?
Why is Sue so down?
Why did the driver cut me off?

Generally, we make two types of attributions:

Internal (a.k.a. Dispositional or Personal):

Self-Attributions that are Internal:

I failed, because I'm stupid
I'm fat because I eat all the time

Other-Attributions that are Internal:

John snapped because he's just a jerk
Sue is down because she can't sing
The driver doesn't know HOW to drive

External (a.k.a. Situational):

Self-Attributions that are External:

I failed because the test was too hard
I'm fat because my mom makes me eat too much

Other-Attributions that are External:

John snapped because he just lost his job
Sue is down because her cat died
The driver just dropped a coke in his lap

Internal vs. External Attributions: So What?!

Type of attribution we make affects how we feel about ourselves and if/how we'll change our behavior.

internal for failure (bad about who we are; less study behavior?)
external for failure (mad at teacher; try to get teacher to change)

how we feel about others and how we'll behave toward them:

internal (angry at John or the driver; yell at them)
external (probably less mad; more forgiving toward them)

"Errors" in Attribution

We commit many kinds of errors, when we make attributions.

One kind of error is:

Fundamental Attribution Error -When explaining a behavior, we attribute it to internal more than to external causes. Stated differently: We underestimate the power of the situation in affecting behavior

Fundamental "other-attribution" errors - We attribute another's behavior to internal causes, especially when the other's behavior is negative or when we devalue the behavior.

Examples: homeless people - people on welfare - victims of abuse - people who are different than we are (gays/lesbians) - people who disagree with us (e.g., pro-choice activists)

Fundamental "self-attribution" errors - We attribute our own behavior to internal causes, especially when there are few vivid external causes. We also attribute our own behavior to internal causes when it reflects positively on us (e.g., Got an "A" on the test because I'm smart).

This person bias, or "fundamental attribution error", occurs in experiments in which the subject's goal is to assess the personality of someone performing an action. When the goal is to assess the situation that provokes the action, the opposite bias - the situation bias - occurs. Both of these biases are especially strong when subjects are kept mentally occupied so that their judgements are based on automatic rather then controlled thought processes.

Crosss-Cultural Differences and the Actor-Observer Discrepancy in Attributions

Other studies indicate that the person bias is more characteristic of people in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures. Moreover, the person bias is weaker, and the situation bias is stronger, when people make attributions about their own behavior than when they make attributions about someone else's. This so-called actor-observer discrepancy might derive from the more extensive knowledge that people have of themselves than of others, or it might derive from the fact that people's eyes are focused on the person when they watch another perform an action and on the situation when they themselves perform an action.

Effects of Prior Information and Physical Appearance

Preexisting beliefs about a person can influence the way in which that person's behavior is judged. Physical appearance is one source of such beliefs. For example, baby-faced people are viewed as more naïve, innocent, and incompetent than are mature-faced people, and their behavior is judged in that light. First impressions are also affected by cultural stereotypes concerning race, gender, age, and other ways of categorizing people. Experiments involving the technique of priming have revealed the even people who are not consciously prejudiced carry the culture's racial stereotypes in their heads and that those stereotypes can bias judgements about a person's actions.

Person Perceptions as Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Preexisting beliefs can sometimes result in self-fulfilling prophecies. In one experiment, teachers were falsely informed that certain of their students had performed exceptionally well on a test of academic potential. The teachers subsequently behaved differently toward those students than toward others, in ways that led those students to achieve more than they otherwise would have.

Perceiving and Evaluating the Self

Our self concepts are social constructs. We acquire them in part from other people's reactions to us and beliefs about us. For that reason we may have multiple self-concepts, each related to a different social role and a different group with which we interact. We also construct aspects of our self-concepts by comparing ourselves to others. We may see ourselves as good or bad at a given task depending on the abilities of the reference group with which we compare ourselves.

Self-Attribution and Self-Perception Theory

Daryl Bem proposed Self-Perception Theory

We observe others and explain their behavior, we observe ourselves and explain our behavior. Therefore, self-attribution proceeds much like other-attribution, especially when internal cues are weak or ambiguous. Try to figure out how self-perception is involved in explaining cognitive dissonance.

Perceiving and Evaluating the Self

HOW DO WE FORM A CONCEPT OF SELF EXACTLY?

Different views on this in social psychology. Some say we "introspect". Essentially read off knowledge of self through cognition. Others caution us about the entire notion of introspection. Nisbett and Wilson research again (knowing more than we can tell). Obvious biases (positive and negative in self-evaluation)

Others say through observations of our own Behavior. This is Daryl Bem's Self-Perception theory. We "watch" ourselves behave and "infer" the kind of person we are from the kinds of behaviors we do.

There's a catch, though: We use our behaviors as a clue to our self-concepts IF AND ONLY IF

• the behavior was not coerced (i.e., not "manded")

• we don't already have a firm belief about ourselves in "this realm" to begin with

Others say through comparisons of our own behavior with others

This is Festinger's Social Comparison theory. We behave (e.g., get 70% on a test)

We look to see how others performed. If the others performed even better, we infer? If the others performed worse, we infer? Social comparisons can be made "up" or "down"

Upward social comparison is? (look this up) How smart would you infer you are after having made an upward social comparison?

Downward social comparison is? (look this up) How smart would you infer you are after having made a downward social comparison?

"Usually" we make social comparisons that are just a "little" upward (e.g., we compare ourselves to people who are just a little smarter). Why do we do this, do you think? For example, we often raise self-esteem by identifying with our group (football team that just won) vs. distancing ourselves from group when performs poorly.

Social comparisons thus also affect how we feel about ourselves (our self-esteem) and are used strategically to bolster our self-esteem. However, some people fairly consistently make extreme upward comparisons (e.g., by comparing themselves to someone who is a LOT smarter than them). People who are clinically depressed do this often. Women have been shown to do this more than men.

Others say we form a self-concept through principles of learning and feedback that we receive from others. Won't really cover learning ideas here; they're pretty obvious

Although not a behaviorist, Cooley emphasized the influence of the environment on our self-concept. You do need to know Cooley's concept of a "looking-glass self" and how our self-concept is affected by feedback from others:

"Each to each a looking-glass
Reflects the other that doth pass"....

"A self-idea seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feelings, such as pride or mortification....the thing that moves us to pride or shame...[is] the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind." (p. 266 from Kollock and O'Brien who reprinted Cooley's original work from the early 1900's).

Know that this idea isn't completely empirically validated (self-perception and PERCEPTION of others' perceptions of self are the most highly correlated. Self-perception & others' actual perceptions are not)

Important to Cooley: Idea of reflected self-appraisal

Experiments on the vicious interactive cycles involving our "looking-glass" self (self-concept), self-esteem, and behavior

The scar face experiment
Snyder et al.'s dating experiment

Cultural Dependence on the Self-Serving Bias

People in Western cultures tend to have inflated views of themselves, a phenomenon that may be explained in part by biased feedback from others, by people's varying definitions of success, by the self-serving attributional bias, and by the inability of the incompetent to judge their own incompetence. Some studies indicate that such self-inflation does not occur in Asian cultures, perhaps due to cultural conditions that promote a more communal, less individualistic outlook.


Cross-Cultural Differences in the Balance of Social Identity and Personal Identity

In every culture, people describe themselves partly in ways that emphasize their unique personality traits - their personal identity - and partly in ways that emphasize the groups to which they belong - their social identity. Depending on which identity is primed, a person's self-esteem may increase or decrease on hearing of the outstanding performance of other members of his or her group. Many studies have demonstrated that social identity is stronger, and personal identity weaker, in Eastern cultures (and in other collectivist cultures) than in Western cultures.

Attitudes: Beliefs Tinged With Emotion

Attitudes can serve self-expressive, social-adjustive, defensive, and utilitarian functions. The value-expressive function is served especially by central attitudes, or values, that are part of one's self-concept. Schwartz found that values tend to cluster into 10 categories that can be arranged in a wheel in which similar values lie adjacent to one another and contradictory values lie opposite one another. This value structure appears to be universal, but the relative importance of each value category varies from culture to culture.

Ask yourself this question: Why do you even hold attitudes? What function do they serve? Be prepared to answer the function question!

The A's, B's, and C's of Attitudes

All attitudes have an OBJECT: oranges, music, abortion, psych 1010. Regarding the object, we have:

'A'ffective reactions (like-dislike)
'B'ehavioral reactions (approach-avoidance)
'C'ognitions (beliefs and perceptions)

Example: attitude object "competency exams for graduating seniors in college"

'A'ffect could be "I hate the idea of..."
'B'ehavioral could be "I refuse to take..."
'C'ognition could be "I think it is asking too much for students to take ..."

Sometimes (but not always) the A's, B's, and C's of any one attitude hang together. The above example illustrates consistency. Hating, refusing to take, and "asking too much" are all consistent with one another. Also, usually, different attitudes "hang together"

Example: It would be consistent for any one person to say...

abortion is murder
carrying out the death penalty is murder
euthanasia is murder

Counter-example: It would not be consistent for any one person to say...

abortion is not murder, yet...
carrying out the death penalty is murder
euthanasia is murder

In short: We strive for consistency within, and across, attitudes

Cognitive consistency

"we try to bring our cognitions, emotions, and behaviors into alignment with one another"

'A'ffect: Big Macs are disgusting
'B'ehavior: I do not eat Big Macs
'C'ognition: Big Macs are bad for your health

Are these elements always consistent with one another?

NO! Think of your last "Mac Attack"

What do we do when there is inconsistency?

Attitudes as Rationalizations to Attain Cognitive Consistency

The social-adjustive function of attitudes is illustrated by studies of cognitive dissonance. To avoid the discomfort that arises from awareness of inconsistency in their beliefs and actions, people will (a) avoid information that contradicts their present attitudes and (b) alter their attitudes to match their actions. People are especially likely to alter an attitude to match an action when they have no easy alternative means of explaining why they did what they did (the insufficient-justification effect). Another example of the defensive use of attitudes derives from the just-world bias: To convince themselves that the world is fair (and that they are safe), people develop negative, blaming attitudes toward those who suffer.

Festinger and Carlsmith study

Subjects offered $1 versus $20 to say they enjoyed a task that they SAID WAS BORING. Who later reported liking the experiment more? Why? When elements are inconsistent, how do we feel? We experience cognitive dissonance. What exactly is cognitive dissonance?

"the state of tension or discomfort when one or more elements are not consonant with one another"

When elements are inconsistent, what do we do? We try to reduce the dissonance. We reduce dissonance by changing the element least resistant to change (i.e., the easiest to change) Which element was least resistant to change in Festinger and Carlsmith study?

Which element was most resistant to change in Festinger and Carlsmith study? Know the Franklin example in terms of cognitive dissonance and insufficient justification

How Are Attitudes Formed and How are We Persuaded?

Attitudes Through Classical Conditioning: No Thought

Attitudes serve a utilitarian function to the degree that they guide behavior in useful ways. Some attitudes, such as those derived from classical conditioning, automatically come into play in response to the object of the attitude, but attitudes that are acquired intellectually must be recalled an thought about if they are to influence behavior. Anything that reminds a person of his or her attitudes - such as the presence of a mirror - tends to increase the consistency between attitudes and actions. According to the theory of planned behavior, the intention to behave in a particular way is influenced not just by one's own attitude but also by the subjective norm (one's sense of what others would think of one for behaving that way) and perceived control (one's confidence in one's own capacity to behave that way.)

Used lots in advertising (sexy women and cars; catchy jingles)

Heuristics

Rules of thumb or shortcuts to decide whether information is valuable

Expert sources
Attractiveness
Trustworthiness
Phrased/framed in terms of values in which I believe
Famous people must be right! (Bill Cosby, Joe Namath, rock/movie stars)

Elaboration Likelihood Model

Whether we take time to really process a persuasive message depends on its personal relevance to it. Less relevance leads to more superficial processing. More superficial processing relies on heuristics (like the ones above). Greater relevance leads to deeper processing Deeper processing => people attend to the strength or quality of the arguments

Studying Attitudes: So What?!

Original hope was that attitudes could be used to predict future behavior

Example: If I knew people's attitudes toward obeying the speed limit, I could predict their actual speeding behavior

Are attitudes predictive of behavior? No, not always (Classic study by La Piere) So, when do attitudes predict behavior?

When attitudes are strong and consistent
When attitudes are specifically related to predicted behavior
When attitudes are based on direct experience
When person is aware of attitude