Chapter 4 Lecture PDF

Chapter 4
Perceiving Persons
Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Social Perception Defined
• Understanding other people is an essential part of everyday life.

• How do we do it? What information do we use?
• Social Perception is the process by which people come to
understand one another
• We will look at this in four ways:
– The “raw data” of social perception; initial impressions
– How we explain and analyze behavior of others
– How we integrate our observations into a coherent impression
of other persons
– How our impressions can subtly create a distorted picture of
reality
• We will take the perceiver’s vantage point
• in life, we are both a perceiver and a target of other’s perceptions
Observation
The Elements of Social Perception

A Person’s Physical Appearance
• We cannot “see” someone’s mental or emotional state or his

motives or intentions
• So, the social perceiver comes to know others by relying on
indirect cues - the elements of social perception:
• persons, situations, behavior
• Let’s start with the first element, persons:
• People evaluate faces quickly, spontaneously, and unconsciously
• We infer personal characteristics from the face
– We read traits from faces, as well as read traits into faces,
based on prior information
– make judgments/form impressions from faces in faction of a
second
– superficial cues can lead us to form quick impressions

First Impressions in a Fraction of a
Second
Participants rated unfamiliar faces based on pictures they saw for one-
tenth, half, or a full second to see if their impressions would stay the
same or change with unlimited time.
-correlated their ratings with ratings made by observers with no
exposure time limits.
Results: ratings were highly correlated even at the briefest exposure

times!
Why Do We Judge “Baby-Faced”
Adults Differently?
• People with baby-faced features (large round eyes, high eyebrows,

round cheeks, large forehead, smooth skin, round chin) are seen as
kind, warm, naive, weak, honest, submissive
• People with more mature features are seen as stronger, more
dominant, and more competent
• Possible explanations
– Humans are genetically programmed (by evolution) to respond gently
to infantile features (so that real babies receive love and care):
– brain-imaging studies show frontal lobe regions associated with
love are activated when exposed to pictures of babies’ faces but
not to pictures of faces of other adults
– it is also activated by pictures of baby-faced men
– We learn to associate infantile features with helplessness and then
overgeneralize this expectation to baby-faced adults
– Facial expressions are temporary but can also influence perceptions

Perceptions of Situations
• We often have “scripts” or preset notions about certain types of

situations
– Enables us to anticipate the goals, behaviors, and outcomes
likely to occur in a particular setting
– ex: you can easily imagine the sequences of events likely to
unfold in a typical greeting, at shopping mall, the dinner table
– the more experience you have with a situation, the more
detailed your scripts will be
– are culture-specific
• Knowledge of social settings provides context for understanding
other people’s verbal and nonverbal behavior
Ex: expect people to be polite during a job interview, but
•
playful at a picnic, and rowdy at a NASCAR rally
– Effects of context on perception of emotions are quick and
automatic
Behavioral Scripts: The First Date
» These behavioral scripts can be very elaborate.

» Pryor & Merluzzi (1985) asked U.S. college
students to list the sequence of events that take
place in the “first date” script
» From the lists, a picture of a typical American
first date emerged
» More than 30 years later, despite some
changes in dating and gender norms, this
basic script has remained essentially the
same
» See next slide
The “First Date” Script
» 1. Male arrives
» 2. Female greets male at door
» 3. Female introduces date to parents or roommate
» 4. Male & female discuss plans, small talk
» 5. They go to a movie
» 6. They get something to eat or drink
» 7. Male takes female home
» 8. If interested, he remarks about a future date
» 9. They kiss
» 10. They say goodnight
» Pryor & Merluzzi (1985) then randomized their list of events and
asked participants to arrange them into the appropriate order.
» Those with extensive dating experience were able to organize the
statements more quickly than those with less experience.
Judging Emotions in Context
Look at the face of tennis star Serena Williams on the left.

-how is she feeling? angry perhaps? or in agony?
Now look at her in the full context on the right. You can see that she was
actually euphoric, clenching her fist in victory at the 2008 U.S. Open.
Highlights the importance of context.

Behavioral Evidence
• A first step in social perception is recognizing what a person is

actually doing in a given moment
• We derive meaning from our observations by dividing the
continuous stream of human behavior into discrete units
• Mind perception: the process by which people attribute humanlike
mental states to various animate or inanimate objects, including
other people
• Knowing how someone is feeling can be tricky, because people
often try to conceal their emotions from others
• ex: have you ever had to suppress your rage at someone, mask
your disappointment, feign surprise, pretend to like something
to be polite?
• Nonverbal behavior is a silent language that helps us identify a
person’s inner states

How Good Are People at Identifying
Emotions in the Face?
People can reliably identify at least 6 primary emotions

-happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust
In this meta-analysis, results showed people all over the world from 42
countries could recognize the 6 basic emotions from posed facial expressions.
A smile is a smile, a frown is a frown, and just about everyone knows what
these things mean.
Nonverbal Cues
• The face expresses emotions in ways that are both innate and understood by
people all over the world
– anger superiority effect: people are quicker to spot angry faces in a crowd
than faces with neutral, non-threatening emotions
– has a survival value!
– it’s more evolutionarily adaptive to be wary of someone who is angry and
hence prone to lash out in violence
– also adaptive to recognize disgust-can signal threats like foul odor, spoiled
food
• Other nonverbal cues:
– Body language
– Eye contact or gaze
– Physical touch
• Nonverbal cues are important! We see the social value of the human face when we
communicate by text or email and our words get misinterpreted, especially when
the writer is trying to be funny or sarcastic.
• Hence, the need for emojis to fill in the gap!

Detecting Truth and Deception
• People often stretch or conceal the truth, which can make social
perception even trickier.
• Can social perceivers tell the difference when someone is lying or
telling the truth?
• Freud: “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he
chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every
pore.”
• Research has shown that there is no one behavioral cue like
Pinnocchio’s growing nose that can be used to signal deception.
• One reason it is so difficult to detect is that channels of
communication differ in terms of how easily they can be controlled
– The face, for instance, is relatively easier for deceivers to control
– Nervous movements of hands and feet are somewhat harder to control

Can the “Experts” Distinguish
Between Truth and Deception?
Research has consistently shown people

are only about 54% accurate in judging
truth & deception.
Even professionals specially trained to

make these judgments (detectives, judges,
psychiatrists, customs inspectors, and those
who administer lie-detector tests for the  
CIA, FBI, and the military) are all highly
prone to errors!
In this study on the left, you can see the

accuracy rates are very low!
Consider this: there’s a 50-50 chance of

guessing correctly, just due to chance.
Only a sample of Secret Service agents did

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. better than chance.
Why Do We Have Difficulty
Detecting Deception?
• Moral of the story is: we are not very good at detecting deception, despite
what modern TV shows suggest.
• Why? There appears to be a mismatch between the behavioral cues that
actually signal deception and the ones used to detect deception
• Four channels of communication provide relevant information:
– Words: cannot be trusted (people can lie)
– Face and body: generally controllable
– Voice: most revealing cue
• Typical behavioral cues are not very telling
• eye contact, squirming, fidgeting are all not well supported by research
as reliable cues!
• note: truth tellers also exhibit signs of stress! (the ones we attribute to
lying)
• we should be relying on effort instead
• why? because lying is harder and requires more thinking than telling
the truth
Attribution
From Elements to Dispositions

Dispositions
• Dispositions are stable characteristics,

such as personality traits, attitudes, and
abilities
• Used to predict future behaviors
• Inferred indirectly from what a person
says and does since we cannot actually
see dispositions.

Attribution Theories
• Attribution theories describe how people explain the

causes of behavior
• Heider grouped explanations into two categories
– Personal attributions: blame it on the person
– Situational attributions: blame it on the situation

Jones’s Correspondent Inference
Theory
• People try to infer from an action whether the act itself corresponds
to an enduring personal characteristic of the actor
• People make inferences on the basis of three factors:
– Person’s degree of choice
– behavior that’s freely chosen says more about a person than
behavior that’s coerced by the situation
– Expectedness of the behavior
– action tells us more about a person when it departs from the
norm than when it is expected under the circumstances
– ex: it might say more about a student who wears a 3-piece
suit to class than a student who wears jeans to class
– Intended effects or consequences of behavior
– acts that produce many desirable outcomes no not reveal
motives as clearly as acts that produce only one desirable
outcome
What Does This Speechwriter Really
Believe?
Participants who read student’s speech

(behavior) were more likely to assume
that it reflected the student’s true
attitude(disposition) when the
position was freely chosen (left) than
when assigned by professor (right).
But also note the evidence for the

fundamental attribution error!
-even participants who thought the
student had been assigned a position
inferred the student’s attitude from
the speech.
-more on this later!
Kelley’s Covariation Theory
• Covariation principle: for something to

cause a behavior, it must be present when
the behavior occurs and absent when it
does not
• Useful types of covariation:
– Consensus: how are other people reacting to
the same stimulus?
– Distinctiveness: is the person’s behavior
consistent over time?
– Consistency: does the person react the same or
differently to different stimuli?
Attribution Biases
• We are limited in our ability to process all relevant

information
• We lack the training needed to fully employ the principles of
attribution theory
• We often don’t think carefully about the attributions we
make
• Speed brings bias and, perhaps, loss of accuracy
• in other words, we take mental shortcuts that have
consequences —> cognitive heuristics

Cognitive Heuristics
• Information-processing rules of thumb

that enable us to think in ways that:
– Are quick and easy
– But often lead to error!
– One rule of thumb that can be particularly

troublesome is the availability heuristic.

Availability Heuristic
• Estimating the likelihood that an event will occur based on how easily
instances of it come to mind
• ex: ask people what’s more common, words that start with the letter
R or contain R as the third letter
• most people guess there are more words that start with R
• in reality, there are many more English words with R as the 3rd letter,
but we make this error because it’s easier to bring to mind words that
start with R
• Problems with the availability heuristic:
– False-consensus effect
– tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share their
opinions, attributes, attitudes, behaviors
– Base-rate fallacy and misperception of risk
– people are influenced more by graphic, dramatic events, than
from numerical base rates or probabilities
– help explain fears of flying, buying lottery tickets, etc.
The False-Consensus Effect
Participants who did and did

not rate various traits as
descriptive of themselves
estimated the % of others
who had the traits.
As you can see, participant’s

estimates of the population
consensus were biased by
their own self-perceptions
(Kruger, 2000).

Counterfactual Thinking
• Imagining alternative outcomes that might have occurred but

did not (“What if…?”)
• Types
– Imagining results that are better than actual results
– result: disappointment, regret, frustration
– Imagining results that are worse than actual results
– results: relief, satisfaction, elation
• Top three regrets: education, career, and romance

Fundamental Attribution Error
• Overestimates the role of personal factors and underestimates the

impact of situations
• remember: we are greatly influenced by situational context!!!!
• we sometimes fail to consider this and make attribution errors
• Example: you observe someone trip on the sidewalk. Do you think:
• There must be uneven pavement there (situational attribution)
• OR That person is clumsy (personal attribution)
• A pervasive bias, despite awareness of the situation’s impact on
behavior
• Social perception is a two-step process
1. Identify the behaviors and make quick personal attribution
(automatic)
2. Adjust that inference to account for situational influences
(requires attention, thought, and effort)
Fundamental Attribution Error
» Gilbert & Malone (1995)

» theorized the problem stems from how we make attributions
» two-step process
» first, identify behavior and make a quick personal
attribution (simple, automatic)
» then, correct or adjust attribution to account for the
situational influences (requires effort)
» perceivers more likely to commit the fundamental attribution
error when they are cognitively busy or distracted than when
they pay full attention
» seems the second step suffers more than the first
Fundamental Attribution Error and
the TV Quiz Show
In a TV Quiz Show, participants were randomly

assigned to play the role of questioner or
contestant.
-questioners were asked to write 10 challenging
questions from their own memory
-contestants answered only about 40% of the
questions correctly
Participants rated the questioner’s and

contestant’s general knowledge on a scale of
0 to 100.
Questioners appeared more knowledgeable

than the contestants.
-but the situation put the questioners at a
distinct advantage!
Culture and Attribution
• Language and culture can influence the

way people think about:
– Time
– Space
– Objects
– Other aspects of physical world
• Can also influence the way we view
individuals and their place in the social
world

Fundamental Attribution Error:  
A Western Bias?
American and Asian Indian participants of various ages described the

causes of negative actions they had observed.
-among young children, there were no cultural differences
-with increasing age, Americans made more personal attributions and
Indian participants made more situational attributions
***The findings suggest fundamental attribution error is a Western
Phenomenon.
Focal Objects and Backgrounds
• Cultural differences in attribution are

founded on varying folk theories about
human causality
• Cultural differences in terms of what
people focus on is seen in natural settings

East Asian and Western Art
Western art tends to occupy more space focusing on people.

East Asian art tends to have higher horizons and smaller
people to scenery ratios.
Motivational Biases
• Wishful seeing: the tendency to see what we want to see
• ex: participants quicker to identify rapidly presented foods when
hungry than when had recently eaten
• see next slide for another example of wishful seeing
• Need for self-esteem
• leads us to make favorable, self-serving, one-sided attributions for
our own behavior
• people tend to take more credit for successes than they take blame
for failure - self-serving bias
• Belief in a just world
• personal defense motives can lead us to blame others for their
misfortunes/to be critical of victims
• people have a need to view the world as a place in which “we get
what we deserve”
• why? because otherwise we have to accept that we too are
vulnerable to the cruel twists of fate
Motivated Visual Perception:
Wishful Seeing
» What do you see, the letter B or the

number 13? (hint: it is ambiguous
and can be seen either way)
» Research participants were told that
they would be assigned to taste
orange juice or a foul-smelling free
drink depending on whether a letter
or a number was flashed on a screen
» For those told that a letter would
yield orange juice, 72% saw the
image as B
» For those told that a number would
yield orange juice, 61% saw a 13
» Sometimes people see what they
want to see - wishful seeing.
Integration
From Dispositions to Impressions

Information Integration: The
Arithmetic
• Impression formation: the process of

integrating information about a person to
form a coherent impression
• How do you combine personal attributions
into a single coherent picture of the
person?
– Summation model or averaging model

Information Integration: The
Arithmetic (cont'd.)
• Information integration theory –

impressions formed of others based on:
– Personal dispositions of the perceiver
– A weighted average of a target person’s traits

Deviations from the Arithmetic
• Perceiver characteristics
– We differ in the kinds of impressions we form
of others; we use different criteria
– We tend to use ourselves as a frame of
reference
– Our current mood can influence our
impressions
• Embodiment effects
– The way we view ourselves and others is
affected by the physical position, orientation,
sensations, and movements of our own bodies
(cont'd.)
• Priming effects
– The characteristics we tend to see in other
people can be influenced unconsciously by
our own recent experiences
– the tendency for frequently or recently used
concepts to come to mind easily and
influence the way we interpret new
information

The Priming of Social Behavior
Without Awareness
Compared with those who had previously been

given neutral words to unscramble (center),
participants five politeness words were less likely
to interrupt the busy experimenter (left) and
those given rudeness words were more likely to
cut in (right).
These results show that priming can influence not

only our social judgments but our behavior as well!

(cont'd.)
• Target characteristics
– Across cultures, individuals can be distinguished along five
broad traits: extroversion, emotional stability, openness to
experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
– Trait negativity bias: negative information carries more weight
than positive information
– ex: we form more extreme impressions of a person who is
said to be dishonest than someone said to be honest
– one bad trait might be enough to tarnish a person’s
reputation, regardless of other good qualities!
• Implicit personality theories
– A network of assumptions about the relationships among various
types of people, traits, and behaviors
– we assume certain traits and behaviors are linked together

Universal Dimensions of Social
Cognition

Perceptions of Moral Character
• Accurate perceptions of moral character

are essential to determining whether
someone can be trusted
• “Moral” vs. “warm”
– Moral: e.g., courageous, fair, principled, just,
honest, trustworthy, loyal
– Warm: e.g., warm, sociable, happy, agreeable,
enthusiastic, easygoing, fun, playful
• Judgments about a person’s morality are
made instantly and intuitively
The Primacy Effect
• The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have

more impact on impressions than information presented later
• this is why first impressions are so critical!
• Asch (1946)
• one group of participants learned a person was “intelligent,
industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious”
• a second group received the same list but in the reverse order
• In reality, both groups should have felt the same way about the
person
• however, participants who heard the first list in which the more
positive traits came first formed more favorable impressions
than those who heard the second list

Primacy Effect: Explanation #1
• Once we think we have formed an

accurate impression of someone, we pay
less attention to subsequent information
• People differ in their need for closure
– Desire to reduce ambiguity
– Primacy effect less likely to occur for those
who have a lower need for closure

Primacy Effect: Explanation #2
• Change of meaning hypothesis

– Once we have formed an impression, we start
to interpret inconsistent information in light
of that impression
– The meaning of a trait can be malleable

Confirmation Biases
From Impressions to Reality

Confirmation Bias
• Once we make up our mind about

something, how likely are we to change
it, even when confronted with new
evidence?
• Confirmation bias: our tendency to seek,
interpret, and create information that
verifies existing beliefs

Perseverance of Beliefs
• We interpret ambiguous events in ways that confirm our existing

beliefs
• Belief perseverance: the tendency to maintain beliefs even after
they have been discredited
– Can be reduced or eliminated when we are asked to consider
why alternative explanations may be true

Mixed Evidence: Does it Extinguish
or Fuel First Impressions?
Participants evaluated the academic potential of a schoolgirl.

Without seeing her test performance, those with high
expectations rated her slightly higher than those with low
expectations. Among those who watched a tape of the girl
taking a test, the expectations effect was even greater!

Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing
• Do we seek information objectively or are

we inclined to confirm the suspicions we
already hold?
– Our expectations can influence the evidence
we choose to look for
– People are often unaware of their own
existing beliefs

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• The process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually

lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations
• Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom” study:
• noticed that teachers had higher expectations for better
students and wondered if teacher expectations influenced
student performance rather than the other way around.
• they told teachers that certain students were on the verge of
an intellectual growth spurt (in reality, the students had been
randomly selected).
• 8 months later, when real tests were administered, the “late
bloomers” exhibited an increase in their IQ scores compared
with children assigned to a control group AND they were
evaluated more favorably by their teachers
• Suggests that yes, expectations can actually influence
performance, demonstrating support for the self-fulfilling prophecy
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy as a
Three-Step Process
How do people transform their expectations into reality?

1. Perceiver has expectations of a target person
2. Perceiver then behaves in a manner consistent with those expectations
3. The target unwittingly adjusts behavior according to the perceiver’s actio

Social Perception
The Bottom Line

Social Perception: The Bottom Line
• There are two ways of forming social perceptions

– Quickly and relatively automatically
• Based on physical appearance, preconceptions, cognitive
heuristics, with minimal behavioral evidence
– Mindfully
• Based on careful observation and logical analysis of the
individual, behavior, and situation
• Both accounts of social perception are correct.

• sometimes our judgments are made instantly
• at other times, they are based on more painstaking analysis of
behavior
• We tend to steer our interactions with others along a path that is
narrowed by first impressions, a process that can set in motion a self-
fulfilling prophecy
The Processes of Social Perception

So, How Accurate Are Our
Impressions of Each Other?
• This question is provocative and hard to answer

• As we learned in this chapter, there are problems with our
impressions:
– First, we often exhibit biases in our social perceptions
– We have a tendency to focus on the wrong cues to determine
if someone is lying
– We use cognitive heuristics which can be misleading
– We tend to overlook the situational influences on behavior
– We have disparaged victims because their misfortunes
threaten our sense of justice
– Furthermore, we often have little awareness of our own
limitations, leading us to feel overconfident in our judgments
• However, on the other hand, our biases do not necessarily result in
error, and there are also some reasons to be more optimistic about
our competence as social perceivers (see next slide).
Reasons Why We Can Be Competent
Social Perceivers
• The more experience we have with each

other, the more accurate our judgments
are
• Although we are not good at making
global judgments of others, we are able
to make more limited specific predictions
of how others will behave in our own
presence

Reasons Why We Can Be Competent
Social Perceivers (cont'd.)
• We can form more accurate impressions when

we are motivated by concerns of accuracy and
open-mindedness
• Some individuals are more accurate than
others in their social perceptions
• not everyone suffers from high levels of
error and bias.
• Simply being aware of the biases described in
this chapter is a first step in protecting against
them and toward a better understanding of
others.

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Chapter 4

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Understanding other people is an essential part of everyday life.

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• We cannot “see” someone’s mental or emotional state or his

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Results: ratings were highly correlated even at the briefest exposure

• People with baby-faced features (large round eyes, high eyebrows,

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• We often have “scripts” or preset notions about certain types of

» These behavioral scripts can be very elaborate.

Look at the face of tennis star Serena Williams on the left.

Highlights the importance of context.

• A first step in social perception is recognizing what a person is

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

People can reliably identify at least 6 primary emotions

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Research has consistently shown people

Even professionals specially trained to

In this study on the left, you can see the

Consider this: there’s a 50-50 chance of

Only a sample of Secret Service agents did

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Dispositions are stable characteristics,

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Attribution theories describe how people explain the

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Participants who read student’s speech

But also note the evidence for the

• Covariation principle: for something to

• We are limited in our ability to process all relevant

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Information-processing rules of thumb

– One rule of thumb that can be particularly

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Participants who did and did

As you can see, participant’s

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Imagining alternative outcomes that might have occurred but

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Overestimates the role of personal factors and underestimates the

» Gilbert & Malone (1995)

In a TV Quiz Show, participants were randomly

Participants rated the questioner’s and

Questioners appeared more knowledgeable

• Language and culture can influence the

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

American and Asian Indian participants of various ages described the

• Cultural differences in attribution are

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Western art tends to occupy more space focusing on people.

» What do you see, the letter B or the

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Impression formation: the process of

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

• Information integration theory –

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Compared with those who had previously been

These results show that priming can influence not

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.