Module 4: Social Perception

I. SOCIAL PERCEPTION
➢ Refer to the first stages in which people process information in order to determine
another individual’s or group’s mind-set and intentions. These early stages help us
interpret each other’s actions so that additional information can be quickly
inferred in order to predict behavior.
➢ The initial stage of evaluating intentions and psychological dispositions of others
by analysis of gaze direction, body movement, and other types of biological
motion (Allison et al., 2000).
➢ Refers to the processes through which we use available information to form
impressions of other people, to assess what they are like.
➢ Can obviously be flawed – even skilled observers can misperceive, misjudge, and
reach the wrong conclusions. Once we form wrong impressions, they are likely to
persist.

II. INITIAL IMPRESSION FORMATION

A. SOLOMON ASCH’S RESEARCH (1946)
➢ Asch read out personality adjectives to students and asked them to form an
impression of the person described by these words. Participants wrote a brief
description of the target and then ticked any relevant traits on a personality
checklist (e.g., they had to say whether the target was generous or
ungenerous, humorous, or humorless, and so on).
➢ In his experiment, he used two lists of adjectives that were identical except for
a single word. The first list contained the words intelligent, skillful, industrious,
warm, determined, practical, and cautious. The second list simply replaced
the word ‘warm’ with the word ‘cold’.
o Participants hearing the ‘warm’ list were far more likely to describe the
target as generous, wise, good-natured, etc. A typical description was: ‘A
person who believes certain things to be right, wants others to see his point,
would be sincere in an argument and would like to see his point ‘won’.
o A typical description of the ‘cold personality’ was: ‘A rather snobbish
person who feels that his success and intelligence set him apart from the
run-of-the-mill individual.’
➢ CENTRAL TRAIT
o A dispositional characteristic viewed by social perceivers as integral to the
organization of personality.
➢ PERIPHERAL TRAIT
o Within impression formation, a trait whose perceived presence does not
significantly change the overall impression of a person’s personality.
B. PERSON PERCEPTION
➢ Refers to the different mental processes that we use to form impressions of
other people. This includes not just how we form these impressions, but the
different conclusions we make about other people based on our impressions.
➢ This allows us to make snap judgments and decisions, but it can also lead to
biased or stereotyped perceptions of other people.
➢ The process of learning about other people with the aid of our brains designed
to help us judge others efficiently. (Haselton & Funder, 2006; Macrae, 2010).
➢ Infants prefer to look at faces of people than they do other visual patterns, and
children quickly learn to identify people and their emotional expressions (Turati,
Cassia, Simion, & Leo, 2006).
➢ As adults, we are able to identify and remember an unlimited number of
people as we navigate our social environment, and we form impressions of
those others quickly and without much effort.
➢ In our brain, the areas of the prefrontal cortex are found to be more active
when people make judgments about people.
➢ A very subjective process that can be affected by a number of variables.
Factors that can influence the impressions you form of other people include
the characteristics of the person you are observing, the context of the situation,
your own personal traits, and your past experiences.

C. DETECTING DANGER BY FOCUSING ON NEGATIVE INFORMATION

➢ Initial affective reactions are an essential and highly adaptive part of person
perception.
o We assess or determine whether the person poses any threat to our well-
being.
o We may dislike or experience negative emotions about people because
we feel that they are likely to be sick or to harm us, just as we may like and
feel positively about them if we feel that they can help us.
➢ Based on research, the threat and trustworthiness of others are particularly
quickly perceived, at least by people who are not trying to hide their intentions.
➢ Compared with positive information, negative information about a person
tends to elicit more physiological arousal, draw greater attention, and exert
greater impact on our judgments and impressions of the person. (Hansen &
Hansen, 1988)
➢ Neuroscience studies found that our brain seemed to be hardwired to detect
negative behaviors and at an evolutionary level this makes sense.

D. FIRST IMPRESSIONS MATTER: THE PRIMACY EFFECT

➢ The tendency for information presented earlier to be more influential in social
perception and interpretation.
➢ Based on the study of Asch (1946), the participants of the study who heard an
initial list in which the positive traits came first, formed much more favorable
 impressions than did those who heard the second list, in which negative traits
came first.
➢ Early traits lead us to form an initial expectancy about the person and once
that expectancy is formed, we tend to process information in ways that keep
the expectancy intact.
➢ CAUSES:
o REHEARSAL
▪ People tend to rehearse items in order to remember them. Items
presented early in the list are more likely to be remembered because
they have been practiced more than items in the middle or at the end
of a list.
▪ EVIDENCE: Research shows that when study participants are
instructed not to rehearse or are not given enough time to rehearse,
the primacy effect disappears.
o ATTENTION SPAN
▪ People are likely to pay attention at the beginning and at the end of
the presentation of a list of items, and so those are more likely to be
remembered.
o MEMORY LIMITATIONS
▪ The primacy effect likely persists because of limits in memory.
▪ A person might be able to store those first few items to long-term
memory, and those last few items might reside in short-term memory,
but the ones in the middle never get stored.

➢ EARLY STUDIES ON THE PRIMACY EFFECT

o ASCH (1946)
▪ Solomon Asch first examined the primacy effect in a study using sentences
with reversed order of adjectives. In the study using two groups, a character
was described as either “envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious,
and intelligent” or “intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and
envious”. The results showed that the second description led to the person
being rated more highly.
o MURDOCH (1962)
▪ Participants were asked to learn a list of words that varied in length form 10
to 4 words. Each word was presented with a one or two-second gap in
between. Using free call, they were then asked to remember the words.
▪ This study showed that the probability of recalling words on the list
depended on their position on the list. Specifically, those at the beginning
and the end were remembered more often.
o GLANZER AND CUNITZ (1966)
▪ They gave two groups of participants the same list of words. One group was
asked to immediately recall the words after being presented the list, while
the other was asked to count backward in threes for 30 seconds before
they had to recall the list.
 ▪ The study results showed that preventing rehearsal in this way meant that
both the primacy and recency effects disappeared.
➢ WHAT INFLUENCES THE PRIMACY EFFECT?
o TIME OF PRESENTATION
▪ The longer the time between the presentation of items on the list, the
greater the primacy effect. This is due to people having time to rehearse.
o TIME OF RECALL
▪ When there is a delay in recall, it affects the primacy effect in a negative
way such that it is reduced.
➢ MEMORY AND THE PRIMACY EFFECT
o PRIMACY EFFECT: LONG-TERM MEMORY
▪ Involves rehearsing items until they enter long-term memory.
o RECENCY EFFECT: SHORT-TERM MEMORY
▪ Involves the brain’s ability to hold up to seven items in short-term memory.
➢ IMPACT ON MAKING A LASTING IMPRESSION
o If there is something that you want to stand out: say it first, say it last, or both.
This is when it most likely to be remembered.
o If you are trying to convince someone of something, repeat your message
several times so that it is remembered.

E. SOCIAL CATEGORIZATION
➢ In this process, we mentally categorize people into different groups based on
common characteristics.
➢ Allows people to make rapid judgments; to make decisions and establish
expectations of how people will behave quickly, allowing you to focus on other
things.
➢ It can lead to errors, as well as to stereotyping or even prejudice.
➢ WHY DO WE CLASSIFY PEOPLE AND THINGS?
o Simplify perception by grouping together similar experiences. We can pay
attention to some stimuli while ignoring others.
▪ EXAMPLE: If we perceive a neighborhood as friendly, we can walk down
the street without attending carefully to every look from every passerby.
o Allow us to go beyond the information that is immediately available – can
infer additional facts.
▪ EXAMPLE: When we recognize a discussion as a bargaining session, we
infer that the participants represent groups with conflicting interests. We
may also infer that the opening statements are merely initial bargaining
positions, and that vicious verbal attacks do not necessarily signify
personal animosity.
o Help us know how to relate to people and object.
▪ EXAMPLE: In friendly neighborhoods, we can smile at strangers and do
not have to hold on to our wallet so tightly. We can tell secrets to people
who are trustworthy and remain tight-lipped in the presence of gossips.
o Allow us to predict behavior.
 ▪EXAMPLE: A friend will help us to change a flat tire. A vegetarian will turn
down a steak dinner.
➢ HOW DO WE DECIDE HOW TO CLASSIFY PEOPLE AND THINGS?
o PURPOSES OF THE PERCEIVER
▪ We use concepts to determine how people will affect the pursuit of our
goals.
▪ EXAMPLE:
• Airport security guard must decide if rushing travelers are dangerous or
safe, require a close search, or merely a cursory check. Hence, she
classifies passersby as tourists or smugglers, terrorists, or vacationers. She
looks for traits that fit her concept of a potentially dangerous person.
• In contrast, travelers are more likely to look at each other in terms of
ways that reveal the potential for rewarding interaction – age, sex,
physical attractiveness, smoking habits – and classify people in terms of
these things.
o SOCIAL CONTEXT
▪ Refers to activities that are appropriate in a given setting, to the roles
ordinarily enacted there, and to the people who are present. The social
context strongly influences the ways we label people and their behavior.
▪ EXAMPLE: If we are at the beach, and somebody comes along wearing a
swimsuit, spreads out a towel and lies down on it, we might label their
behavior as “relaxed” and perhaps think the person is a vacationer. If a
person did the same thing in a department store, we might think they are
crazy.
o ACCESSIBILITY IN MEMORY
▪ Experience may make some classifications more accessible than others.
▪ EXAMPLE: Suppose a student learns that her roommate has broken both
legs while mountain climbing. If she has recently been discussing with her
parents or friends how foolhardy some students are, may be more likely to
perceive her friend as reckless than as adventurous.
o STEREOTYPES
▪ Enable us to make quick judgments, but these are often wrong.

F. IMPLICIT PERSONALITY THEORIES

➢ A collection of beliefs and assumptions that we have about how certain traits
are linked to other characteristics and behaviors. Once we know something
about a person’s trait, we assume that the person also exhibits other traits that
are commonly linked to that key characteristic.
➢ An integrated set of ideas held by social perceivers about how different traits
tend to be organized within a person.
➢ EXAMPLE:
o If you observe that a new co-worker is very happy, you might immediately
assume that they are also friendly, kind, and generous. As with social
 categorization, implicit personality theories help people make judgments
quickly, but they can also contribute to stereotyping and errors.
➢ CONFIGURAL MODEL
o A holistic approach to impression formation, implying that social perceivers
actively construct deeper meanings out of the bits of information that they
receive about other people.
o Suggests that central adjectives change the meaning of other words rather
than simply attracting greater emphasis.
➢ COGNITIVE ALGEBRA
o A proposed process for averaging or summing trait information when
forming impressions of other people.
o The model suggests that separate pieces of information are simply added
together or averaged.
o The disproportionate effect of ‘central’ adjectives depends on them
conveying comparatively more evaluative information than the other
words that are presented. Further, the impact of a word may depend on its
relevance to the judgement being made.
o EXAMPLE:
▪ If a person is described as ‘warm’ but ‘boring’, the overall impression
would be less positive than if she were descried as ‘warm’ but
‘interesting’, but more positive than if she were described as ‘cold’ and
‘boring’.
▪ People care more about whether someone is ‘warm’ when selecting a
potential friend than a plumber, and therefore attach more weight to
its connotations.

III. INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN PERSON PERCEPTION

A. PERCEIVER CHARACTERISTICS
➢ COGNITIVE ACCESSIBILITY
o The extent to which a person’s characteristic quickly and easily comes to
mind for the perceiver.
o Differences in accessibility will lead different people to attend to different
aspects of the other person.
o People also differ in terms of how carefully they process information about
others.
➢ NEED FOR COGNITION
o The tendency to think carefully and fully about social situations.
o People with a strong need for cognition tend to process information more
thoughtfully and therefore may make more causal attributions overall.
o People without a strong need for cognition tend to be more impulsive and
impatient and may make attributions more quickly and spontaneously.
(Sargent, 2004)
 B. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
➢ ENTITY THEORISTS
o Tend to believe that people’s traits are fundamentally stable and
incapable of change.
o Tend to focus on the traits of other people and tend to make a lot of
personal attributions.
➢ INCREMENTAL THEORISTS
o Believe that personalities change a lot over time and who therefore are
more likely to make situational attributions for events.
o More focused on the dynamic psychological processes that arise from
individual’s changing mental states in different situations.

C. CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN PERSON PERCEPTION

➢ INDIVIDUALSIM: Western Cultures focused on independence and goal-
orientation.
➢ COLLECTIVISM: East Asian Cultures focused on fostering positive relationships/
family-orientation.

REFERENCES:

Cherry, K. (2020). How a person perception helps us form impressions of others. VeryWell
Mind. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/person-perception-2795900.

Cuncic, A. (2020). Understanding the primacy effect. VeryWell Mind. Retrieved from
https://www.verywellmind.com/understanding-the-primacy-effect-4685243.

Hewtone, M., Stroebe, W., & Jonas, K. (2008). Introduction to social psychology: A
European perspective (4th Ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. 42-65. Retrieved from
https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/hewstonesocialpsychology/chapters/c
pt3.pdf.

Lumen Candela (2020). Introduction to social psychology and social perception.

Boundless Psychology. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-
psychology/chapter/introduction-to-social-
psychology/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CSocial%20perception%E2%80%9D%20refers%20to%20th
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Myers & Michener et al. (2020). Social psychology: Social perception/ attribution.
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