Social perception

The process through which we seek to know and understand other people.
Obtaining accurate understanding of others is very important because they play such a central role in our
lives, but in fact, it actually involves many different tasks. We focus on some of the most important here.
First, we consider the ways in which we learn about others from nonverbal communication—
information provided not by their words, but by their facial expressions, eye contact, body movements,
postures, and even changes in their body chemistry, which are communicated through tiny amounts of
substances released into the air.
Attribution, the process through which we attempt to understand the reasons behind others’ behavior—
why they have acted as they have in a given situation, what goals they are seeking, and what intentions
They have. This a crucial process because, as we’ll soon see, the conclusions we reach about why others
behave as they do can strongly influence our reactions To what they say and do.
Third, we examine the nature of impression formation—how we form first impressions of others, and
impression management (or self-presentation)—how we try to ensure that these impressions are
favorable ones.

Nonverbal communication:

Communication between individuals that does not involve the content of spoken language. It relies
instead on an unspoken language of facial expressions, eye contact, and body language.
In situations like these, and in ones in which we can’t ask others how they are feeling, we pay careful
attention to nonverbal cues provided by changes in their facial expressions, eye contact, posture, body
movements, and other expressive actions.

Nonverbal communication: the basic channels

People tend to behave differently when experiencing different emotional states. But precisely how do
differences in your inner states—your emotions, feelings, and moods—show up in your behavior? This
question relates to the basic channels through which such communication takes place. Research
Findings indicate that five of these channels exist: facial expressions, eye contact, body movements,
Posture, and touching.

Facial expressions as clues to others’ emotions more than 2,000 years ago, the roman orator cicero
stated: “the face is the image of the soul.” By this he meant that human feelings and emotions are often
reflected in the face and can be read there in specific expressions.
In fact, it has been found that certain facial expressions—smiles, frowns, and other signs of sadness)
occur, and are recognized as representing basic underlying emotions (e.g., happiness, anger, sadness) in
many different cultures. It seems reasonable to conclude that some facial expressions provide clear
signals of underlying emotional states, and are recognized as doing so all over the world. Cultural
differences certainly do exist with respect to the precise meaning of facial expressions.

Gazes and stares: eye contact as a nonverbal cue

have you ever had a conversation with someone wearing vary dark or mirrored sunglasses? If so, you
realize that this can be an uncomfortable situation. Since you can’t see the other person’s eyes, you are
uncertain about how he or she is reacting. Taking note of the importance of cues provided by others’ eyes,
ancient poets often described the eyes as “windows to the soul.”
While a high level of eye contact with others is usually interpreted as a sign of liking or positive feelings,
there is one exception to this general rule. If another person gazes at us continuously and maintains such
contact regardless of what we do, he or she can be said to be staring. A stare is often interpreted as a sign
of anger or hostility—as in cold stare—and most people find this particular nonverbal cue
Disturbing.
Body language: gestures, posture, and movements

Cues provided by the position, posture, and movement of others’ bodies or body parts.
First, body language often reveals others’ emotional states. More specific information about others’
feelings is often provided by gestures. These fall into several categories. Body movements
Carrying specific meanings in a given culture. Larger patterns of movements, involving the whole body,
can also be informative. Such phrases as “she adopted a threatening posture,” and “he greeted her with
open arms” suggest that different body orientations or postures indicate contrasting emotional states.

Scent: another source of nonverbal social information

Although facial expressions, body movements, gestures, eye contact, and touching are basic and
important sources of nonverbal information, they are not the only ones. Much can also be learned from
what are termed paralinguistic cues—changes in the tone or inflection of others’ voices (quite apart from
the meaning of their words).

Attribution: understanding the causes of others’ behavior

The process through which we seek to identify the causes of others’ behavior and so gain knowledge of
their stable traits and dispositions.

Theories of attribution

Because attribution is complex, many theories have been proposed to explain its operation.
Here, we focus on two classic views that continue to be especially influential.

Correspondent inference

The first of these theories—jones and davis’s (1965) theory of correspondent inference—asks how we
use information about others’ behavior as a basis for inferring their traits. In other words, the theory is
concerned with how we decide, on the basis of others’ overt actions, whether they possess specific traits
or dispositions likely to remain fairly stable over time.
At first glance, this might seem to be a simple task. Others’ behavior provides us with a rich source on
which to draw, so if we observe it carefully, we should be able to learn a lot about them. Up to a point,
this is true. The task is complicated, however, by the following fact: often, individuals act in certain ways
not because doing so reflects their own preferences or traits, but rather because external factors leave
them little choice.
Firstly, we consider only behavior that seems to have been freely chosen, while largely ignoring ones that
were somehow forced on the person in question. Second, we pay careful attention to actions that show
what jones and davis term noncommon effects—effects that can be caused by one specific factor, but not
by others.
Non-common effects
Effects produced by a particular cause that could not be produced by any other apparent cause.
Finally, jones and davis suggest that we also pay greater attention to actions by others that are low in
social desirability than to actions that are high on this dimension.
In sum, according to the theory proposed by jones and davis, we are most likely to conclude that others’
behavior reflects their stable traits (i.e., we are likely to reach correspondent inferences about them), when
that behavior (1) is freely chosen; (2) yields distinctive, noncommon effects; and (3) is low in social
desirability.

Kelley’s theory of causal attributions: how we answer the question “why?”

Covariation theory:
We want to know why other people have acted as they have or why events have turned out in a specific
way. Such knowledge is crucial, for only if we understand the causes behind others’ actions or events that
occur can we hope to make sense out of the social world. Obviously, the number of specific causes
behind others’ behavior is very large. Kelley’s (1967) covariation theory provides a more general account
of how people weigh up different possible causes of an observed action or experience.
According to kelley, the basic rule applied to causal analysis is the covariation principle, which states
that if a response is present when a situation (person, object, event) is present and absent when that same
situation is absent, then that situation is the cause of the response (kelley, 1971). In other words, people
decide that the most likely cause of any behavior is the factor that covaries—occurs at the same time—
most often with the appearance of that behavior.
According to kelley, in our attempts to answer the why question about others’ behavior, we focus on three
major types of information.
First, we consider consensus—the extent to which other people react to a given stimulus or event in the
same manner as the person we are considering. The higher the proportion of people who react in the same
way, the higher the consensus.
Second, we consider consistency—the extent to which the person in question reacts to the stimulus or
event in the same way on other occasions, over time.
And third, we examine distinctiveness—the extent to which this person reacts in the same manner to
other, different stimuli or events.
According to Kelley’s theory, we are most likely to attribute another’s behavior to internal causes under
conditions in which consensus and distinctiveness are low but consistency is high. In contrast, we are
most likely to attribute another’s behavior to external causes when consensus, consistency, and
distinctiveness are all high. Finally, we usually attribute another’s behavior to a combination of internal
and external factors when consensus is low but consistency and distinctiveness are high.
The basic assumptions of Kelley’s theory have been confirmed in a wide range of social situations, so it
seems to provide important insights into the nature of causal attributions.
As an example, letʼs say your friend Kate saw the hit movie fast and furious and raved about it. You are
trying to decide whether you would like it too and whether you should go see it. The questions you have
to answer are, what is the cause of Kateʼs reaction? Why did she like this movie? Is it something about
the movie? Or is it something about Kate?
Consensus information tells us about how other people reacted to the same event or situation. You might
ask, how did my other friends like fast and furious? How are the reviews? How did other people in
general react to this stimulus or situation? If you find high consensus—everybody liked it—well, then, it
is probably a good movie. In causal attribution terms, it is the movie that caused Kateʼs behavior. High
consensus leads to a Situational attribution.
Now, what if Kate liked the movie but nobody else did? Then it must be Kate and not the movie: Kate
always has strange tastes in movies. Low consensus leads to a person attribution (nobody but Kate liked
it, so it must be Kate).
The second source or kind of data we use to make attributions is distinctiveness information. Whereas
consensus information deals with what other people think, distinctiveness information concerns the
situation in which the behavior occurred.
The third source or kind of input is consistency information, which confirms whether the action occurs
over time and situations. We ask, is this a one-time behavior (low consistency), or is it repeated over time
(high consistency)?

Action identification and the attribution process

When we see other people perform some action, and try to understand it—why they are doing
It, what they want to accomplish—we have a wide range of interpretations open to us. For instance,
suppose you saw someone putting loose change into a jar. You could conclude: “she wants to avoid
losing the change so she puts it into the jar.” Alternatively, you could conclude: “she is trying to save so
that she can contribute to her own education.” The first is a low level interpretation that focuses on the
action itself and involves little in the way of planning or long-range goals to the person involved; the
second, in contrast, attributes such plans, intentions, and goals to this person. The action is the same
(putting changes into a jar) but our interpretation of it—and of why it occurs—is very different. The level
of interpretation we use is known as action identification.
As basic knowledge about attribution has grown, so too has the range of practical problems to which such
information has been applied. As an example of such research, we examine how attribution theory has
been applied to understanding one key aspect of mental health: depression.

Attribution and depression: depression is the most common psychological disorder. In fact, it has been
estimated that almost half of all human beings experience such problems at some time during their lives.
Although many factors play a role in depression, one that has received increasing attention is what might
be termed a self-defeating pattern of attributions. In contrast to most people, who show the self-serving
bias described above, depressed individuals tend to adopt an opposite pattern. They attribute negative
outcomes to lasting, internal causes such as their own traits or lack of ability, but attribute positive
outcomes to temporary, external causes such as good luck or special favors from others. As a result, such
people perceive that they have little or no control over what happens to them—they are simply being
blown about by the winds of unpredictable fate.
Fortunately, several forms of therapy that focus on changing such attributions have been developed, and
appear to be quite successful. These new forms of therapy focus on getting depressed people to change
their attributions—to take personal credit for successful outcomes, to stop blaming themselves for
negative outcomes (especially ones that can’t be avoided), and to view at least some failures as the result
of external factors beyond their control. Since attribution theory provides the basis for these new forms of
treatment, it has certainly proven very useful in this respect.

Impression formation and impression Management

Social psychologists were heavily influenced by the work of gestalt psychologists, specialists in the field
of perception. A basic principle of Gestalt psychology was this: “the whole is often greater than the sum
of its parts.” This means that what we perceive is often more than the sum of individual sensations. To
illustrate this point for yourself, simply look at any painting what you see is not individual splotches of
paint on the canvas; rather, you perceive an integrated whole—a portrait, a landscape, a bowl of fruit—
whatever the artist intended. So as gestalt psychologists suggested, each part of the world around us is
interpreted, and understood, in terms of its relationships to other parts or stimuli—in effect, as a totality.
Many studies have reported that even working with what are known as thin slices of information about
others—for instance, photos or short videos of them—perceivers’ first impressions are reasonably
accurate.
Thin slices: Refers to small amounts of information about others we use to form first impressions of
them.
First impressions can be powerful influences on our perceptions of others. Researchers have consistently
demonstrated a primacy effect in the impression-formation process, which is the tendency of early
information to play a powerful role in our eventual impression of an individual. Primacy effect is the
Observation that information encountered early in the impression formation process plays a powerful role
in our eventual impression of an individual.

Implicit personality theories:

We all possess what social psychologists describe as implicit personality theories—beliefs about what
traits or characteristics tend to go together (e.g., sedikes & anderson, 1994). These theories, which can be
viewed as a specific kind of schema, suggest that when individuals possess some traits, they are likely to
possess others, too. Such expectations are strongly shaped by the cultures in which we live. For instance,
in many societies—but not all—it is assumed that “what is beautiful is good”—that people who are
attractive also possess other positive traits, such as good social skills and an interest in enjoying the good
things in life.
Furthermore, fi rst impressions can, in turn, bias the interpretation of later information. This was shown in
a study in which individuals watched a person take an examination (jones, rock, shaver, goethals, & ward,
1968). Some of the observers saw the test-taker do very well at the start and then get worse as the test
continued.
Other observers saw the test-taker do poorly at the beginning and then improve. Although both test-takers
wound up with the same score, the test-taker who did well in the beginning was rated as more intelligent
than the test-taker who did well at the end. In other words, the initial impression persisted even when later
information began to contradict it.
This belief perseverance, the tendency for initial impressions to persist despite later confl icting
information, accounts for much of the power of first impressions.

Impression management:

Impression management is a conscious or subconscious process in which people attempt to influence the
perceptions of other people about a person, object or event by regulating and controlling information in
social interaction.
The desire to make a favorable impression on others is a strong one, so most of us do our best to “look
good” to others when we meet them for the first time. Social psychologists use the term impression
management (or self-presentation) to describe these efforts to make a good impression on others, and the
results of their research on this process suggest that it is well worth the effort: people who perform
impression management successfully do often gain important advantages in many situations

Tactics of impression management

While individuals use many different techniques for boosting their image, most of these fall into two
major
Categories:
Self-enhancement: efforts to increase their appeal to others.
With respect to self-enhancement, specific strategies include efforts to boost one’s appearance—either
physical or professional. Physical appearance relates to the attractiveness and physical appeal of the
individual, while professional appearance relates to personal grooming, appropriate dress, and personal
Hygiene. The existence of huge beauty aids and clothing industries suggests ways in which people
attempt to improve both aspects of their appearance.
Other-enhancement: efforts to make the target person feel good in various ways.
Another major group of impression management tactics are known as other-enhancement. In these
strategies, individuals basically seek to induce positive moods and reactions in others through the use of a
variety of tactics. Additional tactics of other-enhancement involve expressing agreement with the target
person’s views, showing a high degree of interest in this person, doing small favors for them, asking for
their advice and feedback in some manner.