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Chapter 4

SOCIAL PERCEPTION

▪ constructing an understanding of the social world

from the data we get through our senses

▪ processes by which we form impressions of other

people’s traits and personalities

▪ Confirmation bias
➢ focusing on information relevant to that condition and
ignoring or downplaying information that is inconsistent
with a diagnosis of mental illness

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SCHEMAS

▪ to denote a well-organized structure of cognitions

about some social entity such as a person, group, role,
or event.

▪ include information about an entity’s attributes and

about its relations with other entities

▪ Categorization
➢ tendency to perceive stimuli as members of groups or classes
rather than as isolated, unique entities

▪ Prototype
➢ mental representation that serves as a cognitive reference
point for the category

TYPES OF SCHEMAS
▪ Person schemas
➢ cognitive structures that describe the personalities of others
➢ apply either to specific individuals or to types of individuals

▪ Self-schemas
➢ structures that organize our conception of our own characteristics

▪ Group-schemas (stereotypes)
➢ regarding the members of a particular social group or social category
➢ indicate the attributes and behaviors considered typical of members of that
group or social category

▪ Role schemas
➢ indicate which attributes and behaviors are typical of persons occupying a
particular role in a group

▪ Event Schemas (scripts)

➢ regarding important, recurring social events

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WHY DO WE USE SCHEMAS?

1. It influence our capacity to recall information by

making certain kinds of facts more salient and easier
to remember.

2. It help us process information faster.

3. It guide our inferences and judgments about people

and objects.

4. It allow us to reduce ambiguity by providing a way to

interpret ambiguous elements in the situation.

SCHEMATIC PROCESSING

▪ Schematic Memory
➢ people typically remember some of what happened, enough to identify the
appropriate schema and then rely on that schema to fill in other details
➢ people often remember better, those facts that are consistent with their
schemas

▪ Schematic Inference
❑ Schemas affect the inferences we make about persons and other social entities
➢ schemas supply missing facts when gaps exist in our knowledge
➢ may sometimes lead to erroneous inferences

▪ Schematic Judgment
➢ Schemas can influence our judgments or feelings about persons and other
entities
❖ complexity-extremity effect
➢ less complex schemas lead to more extreme judgments and evaluations

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SCHEMATIC PROCESSING

▪ Drawbacks

1. People are overly accepting of information that fits

consistently with a schema.
❖ Confirmatory bias (confirmation bias)
➢ people tend to gather information which will elicit supportive
information of their schemas rather than information which will elicit
contradictory information to their schemas

2. When faced with missing information, people fill in gaps in

knowledge by adding elements that are consistent with their
schemas.

3. Because people are often reluctant to discard or revise their

schemas, they occasionally apply schemas to persons or
events even when the schemas do not fit the facts very well.

IMPRESSION FORMATION
▪ process by which individuals perceive, organize, and
ultimately integrate information to form unified and
coherent situated impressions of others

▪ Trait Centrality
➢ when a trait has a large impact on the overall impression we form of
that person

▪ First Impressions
❖ Primacy effect
➢ tendency to best recall information presented at the start
of a list, than information at the middle or end
❖ Recency effect
➢ tendency to remember the most recently presented
information best

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IMPRESSIONS AS SELF-FULFILLING
PROPHECIES
▪ Self-fulfilling prophecies
➢ When our behavior toward people reflects our impressions of
them, we cause them to react in ways that confirm our original
impressions.

▪ Heuristics
➢ provide a quick way of selecting schemas that often help us
make an effective choice amid considerable uncertainty
➢ snap judgments or intuitive-decision making

ATTRIBUTION THEORY
▪ attribution
➢ process an observer uses to infer the causes of another’s behavior

“Why did that person act as he or she did?”

▪ Dispositional attribution
➢ attributing a behavior to the internal state(s) of the person who performed

▪ Situational attribution
➢ attributing a behavior to factors in that person’s environment

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BIAS AND ERROR IN ATTRIBUTION

▪ Fundamental attribution error
➢ tendency to overestimate the importance of personal (dispositional) factors
and to underestimate situational influences

▪ Focus-of-attention bias
➢ tendency to overestimate the causal impact of whomever or whatever we focus
our attention on

▪ Actor-observer difference
➢ observers tend to attribute actors’ behavior to the actors’ internal
characteristics; actors believe their own behavior is due to external situation

▪ Motivational biases
➢ judgments are influenced by the desirability or undesirability of events,
consequences, outcomes, or choices
➢ motivational factors—a person’s needs, interests, and goals—are another
source of bias in attributions
▪ Self-serving bias
➢ tend to take credit for acts that yield positive outcomes, whereas they
deflect blame for bad outcomes and attribute them to external causes

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1 PERCEIVING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

▪ Our assumptions and prejudgments guide our
perceptions, interpretations and recall.

▪ How?
A. Priming
B. Perceiving and Interpreting Events
C. Belief Perseverance
D. Our mind constructs memories

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PERCEIVING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

A. Priming
▪ particular associations are activated in one’s memory

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PERCEIVING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

A. Priming
▪ particular associations are activated in one’s memory

B. Perceiving and Interpreting Events

▪ Idea: we view the world through our values and attitudes
▪ we look for information that confirms our attitudes/values

C. Belief Perseverance
▪ beliefs and expectations color the way we interpret our social
world; once established, it will persist; facts fit into our belief
system or confirms the beliefs – it will persevere and will be
difficult to discredit

D. Our mind constructs memories

▪ Rosy retrospection–tendency to recall the past more fondly
than the present

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2 JUDGING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

▪ How?
A. Intuitive Judgments
B. Overconfidence phenomenon
C. Heuristics
D. Counterfactual thinking

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JUDGING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

A. Intuitive Judgments
▪ decision reached on the basis of subjective feelings that cannot
easily be articulated and may not be fully conscious

B. Overconfidence phenomenon
▪ confidence in judgment/knowledge higher than its accuracy
▪ Incompetence – sustained when one is ignorant of own
ineffectiveness
▪ Confirmation bias – we tend to seek out information that confirms
(rather than disconfirms) our beliefs

C. Heuristics
▪ simple efficient thinking strategies
▪ Representativeness – judging something intuitively by comparing
it to our mental representation of the category it belongs to.
▪ Availability – likelihood of things in terms of recall potential

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JUDGING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

D. Counterfactual thinking
▪ thinking against the facts influences our feelings
▪ idea: imagining worse alternative thing to make you feel better

E. Illusory thinking
▪ finding order in random events which fundamentally have no order
▪ Illusory correlation – misperception of random events as
confirmation of one’s beliefs
▪ Illusion of control – belief that chance events are under our control

F. Moods color our judgment

▪ mood (feelings) – infuse our judgments
➢ good moods make us see others as more happy; decisions become
easier; good news springs to mind more easily

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3 EXPLAINING OUR SOCIAL WORLD

❑Attribution Theory
▪ Dispositional attributions – attributing behavior to disposition and
traits (internal)
▪ Situational attributions – attributing behavior to environment
(external)

❑Fundamental Attribution Error

▪ tendency to overestimate dispositional/internal causes, and
underestimate situational/external causes
▪ Causes:
✓ Actor-observer difference
✓ Cultural differences

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4 EXPECTATIONS OF OUR SOCIAL WORLD

❑Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
▪ one’s beliefs that leads to own fulfillment
▪ Main ideas:
✓ How we treat others is a reflection of the beliefs we have
formed about them and how we initially treat them.
✓ How others treat us reflects how we have treated them.

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