Download Social Cognition and Perception

Social Cognition and Perception
Social Cognition and Perception: refers to
the mental processes that help us to collect
and remember information about others, and to
form beliefs and attitudes and make judgments
based on that information.
In our social world, we do not respond to
objective reality. Rather, we respond to our
subjective interpretations of reality.
I. Impressions
A. Impression Management: our efforts to produce a favorable
first impression on other people.
B. Tactics of impression management success…
1) Self-Enhancement: attempts to boost our own image.
2) Other-Enhancement: attempts to make the other person feel good.
C. Impression Formation: refers to the process through which
we form an impression of another person or group of people.
D. Do you think that first impressions really are all that
important?
E. Asch’s Research on Central and Peripheral Traits
F. Priming: activating particular associations in memory.
G. Interpersonal Primacy Effect: the first information learned
about someone will be a more powerful influence on our
perceptions than any later information will be.
H. Halo Effect: A liked person is assumed to have many other
good qualities.
I. Horn Effect: A disliked person is assumed to have many
other bad qualities.
II. Nonverbal Communication: the way in
which people communicate, intentionally or
unintentionally, 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 movements
of our bodies.
2) Emblems: nonverbal gestures that have well-understood
definitions within a given culture; they usually have
direct verbal translations, like the “OK” sign.
D. Touching
E. Nonverbal Cues and Deception
1) Micro-expressions: brief and involuntary expressions
of emotion (like fear and anger).
F. Electronic Communication
III. Other Factors Related to Impressions
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.
B. Reconstructing The Past
1) False Memory: a report that an individual believes to be a
memory but that does not correspond to actual events.
2) Misinformation effect: incorporating “misinformation” into
one’s memory of the event after witnessing an event and
receiving misleading information about it.
C. Reconstructing Past Attitudes
1) The Asparagus Effect!
2) Rosy Retrospection: people often recall mildly pleasant
events 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 more
confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of
one’s beliefs.
D. Confirmation Bias: the tendency to search for information
that confirms one’s preconceptions.
1) Self-Verification Theory: people seek, elicit, and recall
feedback that confirms their beliefs about themselves.
E. Heuristics: mental shortcuts.
F. Representativeness Heuristic: the tendency to presume,
sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something
belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing)
a typical member.
1) Base-Rate Information: the data about the frequency
or probability of a given item or event.
G. Availability Heuristic: the strategy of assuming that how
easily one can remember examples of something is an
indicator of how common that thing actually is.
H. Counterfactual Thinking: imagining alternative scenarios
and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t. The more
likely that an alternative scenario or outcome may have
occurred, the more likely one will engage in this type of thinking.
V. Attributions
A. Attribution Theory: the theory of how we explain the
behavior of other individuals; by attributing the behavior to
internal dispositions or to external situations.
1) Internal Attributions: explanations based on an
individual’s perceived stable characteristics, such as
attitudes, personality traits, or abilities.
2) External Attributions: explanations based on the current
situation and events that would influence all people.
B. Kelley’s Attribution Model
1) Consistency Information: how the person’s behavior varies over time
in a given situation.
2) Distinctiveness: how the person’s behavior varies between situations.
3) Consensus Information: how others behave similarly in this situation.
C. Spontaneous Trait Inference: an effortless, automatic
inference of a trait immediately after exposure to someone’s
behavior.
D. Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency for observers
to underestimate situational influences and overestimate
dispositional influences upon the behavior of other individuals.
E. Actor-Observer Effect: the tendency to make external
attributions for our own behaviors and internal ones for the
behavior of others.
F. Objective Self-Awareness: a self-conscious state in which
attention 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 is
like, which…
2) influences how they act toward that person, which…
3) causes that person to behave consistently with
people’s original expectations, making the expectations
come true.
B. Rosenthal’s Research on Teacher Expectations…
Teachers led to believe particular students will
bloom:
1) Create a warmer emotional climate for those
students, 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 in
class and give them longer to respond.