Download personality

Social Psychology
Social Psychology
The branch of psychology that studies
how people think, feel, and behave in
social situations
Two Basic Areas of Social Psychology:
1. Social cognition is the study of the mental
processes people use to make sense out of their
social environment
2. Social influence is the study of the effect of
situational factors and other people on an
individual’s behavior
Making Sense of
Others:
How you form your
judgments
Social Cognition
The mental processes that people use to make
sense out of their social environment
–
–
–
–
–
–
Person perception
Social categorization
Implicit personality theory
Attribution
Attitudes
Stereotypes
Person Perception
Mental processes we use to form judgments and
draw conclusions about the characteristics and
motives of others
•This is an active & subjective process that occurs in
a interpersonal context that has three components:
•The characteristics of the person you are sizing
up
•Your own characteristics as a perceiver
•The specific situation the process occurs in
Person Perception’s Four Basic Principles
Factors that determine your person
perception of others:
• You treat others according to how you
perceive them to be, not by who or what
they really are
• Your goals determine the amount and
kind of information you collect
• You evaluate people partly in terms of
how you expect them to behave (social
norms)
• Your self-perception influences how you
perceive others
(See Subway Scenario in textbook pg. 499)
Social Categorization
• Mental process of classifying people into
groups on the basis of their shared
characteristics.
• Much of it is automatic and spontaneous,
and it often occurs outside conscious
awareness
• Categories are usually broad: gender, race,
age, occupation.
• Using social categories helps us mentally
organize and remember info about others but
may lead to inaccurate conclusions.
• It ignores a person’s unique qualities and
makes a conclusion on very limited
information.
Implicit Personality Theories
• A network of assumptions about the relationship
among various types of people, traits, and behaviors.
• Form cognitive schemas through our previous
experiences that we begin to associate with different
“types” of people.
• When we perceive someone to be a particular “type”
we assume the person will display the traits &
behaviors that others of that “type” display.
• A useful shortcut but not always accurate.
Which One is a Serial Killer?
They ALL are!
Prior Information Effects
• Mental representations of people (schemas)
can effect our interpretation of them
– Kelley’s study
• students had a guest speaker
• before the speaker came, half got a written bio saying speaker
was “very warm”, half got bio saying speaker was “rather
cold”
• “very warm” group rated guest more positively than “rather
cold” group
Physical Attractiveness
• Implicit cultural message is “beautiful is good”
• Halo Effect - Attractive people are perceived as more
intelligent, happier, and better adjusted
• Also seen as more vain and less modest.
• Really NO difference between attractive and less
attractive people on these characteristics
• Overall, attractive people tend to be less lonely,
more popular, and less anxious in social
situations
• Attractive people are more likely to attribute other
people’s approval of their accomplishments to looks
rather than effort or talent.
Effects of Personal Appearance
The Attractiveness Bias
Physically attractive people are rated higher on
intelligence, competence, sociability, morality
– teachers rate attractive children as smarter,
and higher achieving
– adults attribute cause of unattractive child’s
misbehavior to personality, attractive child’s
to situation
– judges give longer prison sentences to
unattractive people
Effects of Personal Appearance
The baby-face bias
– people with rounder heads, large eyes, small
jawbones, etc.,
– rated as more naïve, honest, helpless, kind,
and warm than mature-faced
– generalize to animals, women, babies
Brain reward when making eye contact with
attractive people
Results of an fMRI study show:
• Direct eye contact with a physically attractive
person, a brain area called the ventral striatum is
activated
• When an attractive person’s eye gaze is shifted
away from the viewer, activity in the ventral striatum
decreases
Why does this matter?
• Ventral striatum is a brain area that predicts reward:
– neuronal activity increases when an unexpected
reward suddenly appears
– decreases when an expected reward fails to
appear
– In other words, it makes you feel like this.
Attribution:
Explaining the Causes of
Behavior
Attribution
• Process of inferring the causes of people’s
behavior, including one’s own
• The explanation given for a particular behavior
Attribution Theory
• People tend to give a causal
explanation for someone’s behavior,
often by crediting either the situation
or the person’s disposition
Situational Disposition
• Attributing someone’s actions to the
various factors in the situation
Dispositional Attribution
• Attributing someone’s actions to the
person’s disposition, i.e. their
thoughts, feelings, personality
characteristics, etc.
Effects of Attributions
Attribution Bias
•
•
•
•
•
Fundamental attribution error
Actor-observer discrepancy
Blaming the victim (just-world hypothesis)
Self-serving bias
Self-effacing bias
Fundamental Attribution Error
• Explains how we view behaviors of OTHERS
• The tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s
behavior, to give too much weight to personality and not
enough to situational variables
• People tend to blame or credit the person more than the
situation.
• It is common in individualistic cultures
• See Waitress example
Attitudes as Ways to “Justify” Injustice
• Just-world bias
– a tendency to believe that life is
fair, people get what they deserve
and deserve what they get
– it would seem horrible to think
that you can be a really good
person and bad things could
happen to you anyway
• Just-world bias leads to
“blaming the victim”
– we explain others’ misfortunes as
being their fault,
– e.g., she deserved to be raped,
what was she doing in that
neighborhood anyway?
Actor-Observer Bias
• Explains how we view our OWN behavior
• Attribute personality causes of behavior when
evaluating someone else’s behavior
• Attribute situational when evaluating our own behavior
• We tend to judge a person on their actions we see
whether these are a true reflections of that person or not.
• Why?
– hypothesis 1:
• we know our behavior changes from situation to situation, but we don’t
know this about others
– hypothesis 2:
• when we see others perform an action, we concentrate on actor, not situation
-- when we perform an action, we see environment, not person
– See the Active Psych Demo for more info on this.
Self-Serving Bias
• Tendency to attribute successful outcomes of one’s own
behavior to internal causes and unsuccessful outcomes to
external, situational causes
– Individualistic Cultures do this.
• Self-handicapping – person creates a preliminary excuse
they can fall back on if they do poorly
– Scared you won’t do well on test so stay up late and tell everyone
you didn’t study so you have an excuse if you don’t do as well as
you hope.
Self-Effacing Bias
• Modesty bias - involves blaming
failure on internal, personal factors,
while attributing success to external,
situational factors
– Collectivist cultures do this.
– Less likely to commit the fundamental
attribution error
– More likely to attribute the causes of
another person’s behavior to external,
situational factors rather than to
internal, personal
Cross-Cultural Differences
• Western culture
• Some Eastern cultures
– fate in charge of destiny
– more attributions to
situation
0.70
United States
Attributions to internal
disposition
– people are in charge
of own destinies
– more attributions to
personality
0.60
0.50
0.40
0.30
India
0.20
0
8
11
15
Adult
Age (years)