Social Perception: Understanding Human Behavior

1. CHAPTER 3 Perceiving Other Persons and the World Around Us

2. Perceiving the physical world • Perception is organized: Gestalt principles of perceptual organization • Perception is selective: focus of attention and figure/ground contrasts • Internal factors affecting perception: motives, needs, values, past experience • External factors affecting perception: perceptual salience is affected by intensity, color, size, motion, and novelty

3. Similarity principle (color)

4. Similarity principle (shape)

5. Similarity principle (size)

6. Proximity principle

7. Continuity principle (the Big Dipper)

8. Common fate principle

9. Closure principle

10. Figure/ground contrast

11. Illusory movement

12. Ambiguous figure

13. Ambiguous figure

15. Ambiguous figure (figure/ground contrast and closure)

16. Ambiguous figure (figure/ground contrast and closure)

18. Ambiguous picture

20. Impossible figure (tuning fork)

21. Impossible figure (elephant)

22. Perceiving the physical world • Perception is organized: Gestalt principles of perceptual organization • Perception is selective: focus of attention and figure/ground contrasts • Internal factors affecting perception: motives, needs, values, past experience • External factors affecting perception: perceptual salience is affected by intensity, color, size, motion, and novelty

23. Social cognition: understanding people • Social perception and attention: standing out from the crowd: social salience, unexpected events, inconsistent information • Salience influences causal attribution (social inference) • Salience influences the extremity of evaluations and emotional reactions • Salience influences memory for the person or event • Person memory • Influenced by the goals of impression formation, empathy, self-reference, and expectancy of future interaction • Ironically, anticipated interaction works better than actual interaction does

25. Social cognition processes: Attention, memory, and inference ATTENTION MEMORY INFERENCE Increased salience of the other person

26. Social cognition: understanding people • Social perception and attention: standing out from the crowd: social salience, unexpected events, inconsistent information • Salience influences causal attribution (social inference) • Salience influences extremity of evaluations and emotional reactions • Salience influences memory for the person or event • Person memory • Influenced by the goals of impression formation, empathy, self-reference, and expectancy of future interaction • Ironically, anticipated interaction works better than actual interaction does

27. Social cognition: understanding people • Inference: drawing conclusions from social information • Representativeness heuristic • Illusory correlation • Attribution: understanding the causes of others’ behavior • Consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness information • Attribution to an internal cause, an external cause, or a unique circumstance (prototypical data patterns)

28. Calvin became visibly upset when the new boss criticized him. High consensus, high distinctiveness, high consistency: This is a boss from hell. (external attribution) Low consensus, low distinctiveness, high consistency: Calvin is thin-skinned and easily upset. (internal attribution) Low consensus, low distinctiveness, low consistency: Calvin is feeling particularly vulnerable today. (unique circumstance attribution)

29. Lee filled out the sales contract incorrectly. High consensus, high distinctiveness, high consistency: This particular sales contract is complicated and confusing. (external attribution) Low consensus, low distinctiveness, high consistency: Lee doesn’t know how to do contracts. (internal attribution) Low consensus, low distinctiveness, low consistency: Lee forgot and left her glasses home today! (unique circumstance attribution)

30. Social cognition: understanding people • Causal attribution: some implications for work settings • Internal versus external causal locus: affects judgments of personal responsibility and praise versus blame • Stable versus unstable causal influence: affects judgments of what the outcome(s) will be in the future

31. Internal External Stable Unstable

32. When social perception fails: commonerrors in our efforts to understand others • Overestimating the role of internal causes: the fundamental attribution error • The self-serving bias: taking credit for success, avoiding blame for failure • Self-enhancement • Self-protection

34. Social perception: its role in job interviews and performance appraisals • The Halo Effect: how overall impressions shape judgments • Social perception and the job interview • The relative impact of positive versus negative information (negative information counts more) • Comparisons against other people also play a role • Visual information: appearance makes a difference • Nonverbal cues can have different effects, depending on the context • Social perception and performance appraisal: the role of evaluators’ attributions about one’s performance

35. Impression management: managing the impressions other people have of us • Tactics of self-presentation • Enhancement strategies • Entitlement strategies • Ingratiation strategies • Excuses Excessive use of these strategies can backfire!