Social Psychology Outline

Chapter 5: Social Perception

Presented to:
LLOYD SAJOL, MPsy

Presented by:
Albasin, Lee Anne Kristlyn
Dotillos, Hannah Marie
Dultra, Ricardo Berlino
Fuertes, Julie Andre
Gonzaga, Sheena Jay
Malintad, Jhoyry
Pillotes, Jan Marie
Salles, Quenie
Saniatan, Mayka
 CHAPTER 5: SOCIAL PERCEPTION

REMARKS DEFINITION TERM

It is a key element in sociality because our construal of

the actions and motives of others affects not only how we Social Perception
treat them but also how they treat us.

A type of interview that enables employers to meet

multiple candidates within a short period of time and used Speed Interview
by a wide range of companies.

Humans are capable of making remarkably accurate

impressions of strangers within a few minutes and Thin Slices
sometimes less.

● He demonstrated a similar phenomenon with respect

to marital longevity. His research team examined
videotapes of fifteen-minute discussions of marital
conflict between one hundred twenty-four newlywed
couples. Psychologist John
Gottman
● His researchers coded each second of the interview
with an emotion word based on facial expressions and
then used these ratings to form an overall impression
of the relationship

5.1 Impression Formation Early Research

One of the early pioneers of research on social

perception, who sought to determine how people form Solomon Asch
initial impressions of others.

5.1.1 Two Models of Impression Formation

Asch (1946) suggested possible processes by which initial Additive Model
impressions are created. This is the process by which a
perceiver forms an impression of a person after first
meeting them by observing specific personality traits and
produce an overall impression of the target.

We perceive the person as a psychological unity or Configural Model

configuration of characteristics and that this unity affects
how we construe individual elements

5.2 Forming First Impression

Theory that studies how people use various mental

Person Perception
processes to make impressions of other

Understanding Emotional expressions, detecting lies, and Aspects of Person

determining the causes of social behavior. Perception

5.2.1 Biases in Social Perception

One set of biases are called implicit personality

Biases in Social
theories or lay theories about the kinds of person
Perception
characteristics that are typically found together.

Are like schemas, knowledge structures that influence Implicit Personality

how we construe our social world. Theory

● Culture-based implicit personality theories are

embedded in the English and Chinese languages.
● Hoffman and colleagues (1986) provided participants
with four personality sketches reflecting distinct Culture-Based Implicit
character types. Two of the character types—artistic Personality Theories
and liberal, rooted in English languages, whereas the
other two—shi gu and shen cang bu lou, Chinese
based.
 When an initially inaccurate expectation leads to
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
behaviors that cause that expectation to come true.

● A social psychologist who conducted one of the most

famous demonstrations of the self-fulfilling prophecy in
1964 in a San Francisco elementary school.
● Rosenthal administered an intelligence test to all of Robert Rosenthal
the students in 18 classrooms and told the teachers
that the test predicted which students would show
“intellectual blooming” during the following academic
year.

5.2.2 Nonverbal Communication and Emotional Expressions

Perceptible social behavior that is extra linguistic and not

Nonverbal Behavior
primarily intended to manipulate the physical world.

Form the foundation of human social behavior and are

Nonverbal Behavior and
essential to the smooth functioning of nonhuman primate
Communication
societies.

Body Language and Emotional Expression, both of Two Categories of

which provide information to other people about what they Nonverbal
are thinking, feeling and intending. Communication

● Broke down nonverbal communicative behaviors into

five categories, each with different function:
Paul Ekman
● Emblems, Illustrators, Manipulators, Regulators,
and Emotional Expressions

Gestures that have a direct linguistic translation into one

Emblems
or two words or phrases.
 Gestures that help to illustrate what is being said, and
they typically accompany rather than replace words.
Illustrators
Pointing to an object or holding one’s hand a certain
distance apart to convey a particular size are illustrators.

Help to guide interactions between people. Regulators

Ekman calls his fourth category adaptors and describes

them as behaviors that, while they may have once been
performed to fulfill a bodily need or to manage emotions Manipulators
or interpersonal contacts, have evolved to serve a
communicative function.

The acknowledgement of these emotions we are built to

Emotional Expressions
feel.

5.2.2.1 Emotional Expressions: Universal or Culturally Specific

Charles Darwin’s seminal 1872 book contained some of The Emotional

the most important early thinking about the evolutionary Expression of Emotions
basis of emotional expressions in Man and Animals

Specific facial expressions of emotion:

1. Are universally found in appropriate, emotionally
arousing situations;
2. Are correlated with self-reports of emotional
experiences; Five Basic Claims of
3. Are embedded in broader sets of emotional Emotional Expression
responses;
4. Are universally recognized as distinct; and
5. Serve important functions in interpersonal
relationships and social situations
 Anger, Surprise, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, and
Disgust—are held to be universally recognized across Six Facial Expressions
cultures

5.2.2.2. Ekman and colleagues three types of studies

Individuals from various cultures (including an isolated

group of New Guineans) posed expressions
corresponding to these six emotions, and to the extent
1st type
that expressions from one culture were correctly labeled
by members of other cultures, universality was
demonstrated.

American and Japanese men were secretly filmed while

watching either an emotionally neutral nature video or one 2nd type
depicting bodily mutilation.

Ekman and other researchers exposed individuals from

12 cultures to photographs of facial expressions and
3rd type
found high levels of agreement across the six major
emotions.

Rules indicating which facial expressions are appropriate

Display Rules
in a given context.

Conducted a meta-analysis of 97 studies encompassing Elfenbein and Ambady

42 cultures and over 20,000 participants. (2002)

Combines multiple studies, usually by different

researchers, into one analysis that allows the researchers Meta-analysis
to draw conclusions about the set of studies as a whole.

5.2.3 Recognizing Happiness

● Asked participants to identify, as quickly as possible, a Hansen and Hansen

single divergent expression from a sea of faces. In (1988)
some cases, a happy face was hidden in a sea of
 neutral or angry faces, whereas in others an angry
face was placed with neutral or happy faces. Almost
invariably, angry faces were identified much more
rapidly than happy or neutral faces.
● Hansen and Hansen dubbed this the face-in-the-
crowd effect and found whether the crowd faces were
all the same or different persons.

● Identified and eliminated a number of confounds with

earlier face-in-the-crowd studies that led the earlier
researchers to mistakenly believe that the differences
in their dependent variables were caused by the
manipulations of their independent variables.
● They found that smiling, happy faces were easier to Becker and Wright (2011)
spot, even if they used closed-mouth smiles in which
teeth were hidden. These researchers hypothesize
that people are better at detecting happy faces
because they are far more prevalent than angry
expressions and that happy faces evolved to be more
easily recognizable.

5.2.4 Emotion Blends and Dialects

Wherein an expression reflects more than one emotion,

Blended Emotions
such as fear and surprise or disgust and contempt.

Slight variations in specific displays of emotion between

cultures—can reduce accuracy in emotion recognition Emotion Dialects
across cultures.

Interpretation of facial expressions and other nonverbal

Decoding
behavior.

5.3 Doing Research: The Challenges of Cross-Cultural Studies

Help identify aspects of human social behavior that are
Evolutionary Approach
universal.

It is inherently cultural, and it has been argued that one of

the universal aspects of human nature is that it is molded Social Behavior
by culture and that humans are “beasts for culture”

Present several significant challenges that must be met in

order to create valid and reliable studies, including those
Cross-Cultural Studies
pertaining to language, situational equivalence, response
styles, and sampling

5.3.1. Language

One of the most obvious yet profound differences

Language
between cultures.

A process of rendering meaning, ideas, or messages of a

Translations
text from one language to other language

Cross-cultural translations are related to the Sapir-Whorf

linguistic relativity hypothesis, which, in its strong form,
states that people who speak different languages think Cross-Cultural
about the world in fundamentally divergent ways, with the Translations
implication that accurate translation is extremely difficult, if
not impossible.

At least two translators, both of whom are fluent in the two

languages. Ideally, there is at least one native speaker of Back Translation
each of the languages.

5.3.2. Experimental Equivalence

Members of different cultures may understand the Experimental Equivalence

instructions in divergent ways, and determining whether
discrepancies in responses to the experimental
manipulations are caused by true cultural differences or a
 result of poor translations or misconstruals can be tricky.

5.3.3. Response Styles

Influence participants' answers to surveys and

questionnaires and it can be a challenge within a culture,
Response Biases
because they can also pose a problem when surveying
individuals from different cultures.

The best way to prevent them from confounding

psychological studies is to gather data from individuals Culture-Based Response
using several different methods in hopes of finding Biases
convergent or consistent results.

5.3.4. Sampling

● Additional problem that can arise when conducting

cross-cultural research is determining how to sample
across cultures or persons within cultures. Other times
psychologists select cultures that are likely to be or
have been previously shown to be different on a key
variable, such as individualism/collectivism. Sampling

● Both researchers and students must remember the

fact that there is great variation between nations
despite the fact that these nations may be similar in
their overall levels of individualism/ collectivism.

5.3.5. Measuring Individualism/Collectivism.

● One of the most widely researched cross-cultural Individualism/

variables. Researchers have often placed nations and Collectivism Dimension
cultures in either the individualism or collectivism
category, this variable is truly dimensional—there are
many points along a continuum that reflect varying
degrees—and there is a fair amount of intranational or
 intracultural variation.
● Not all people in individualistic nations are
individualistic, and not all people in collectivistic
nations are collectivistic.

5.3.6. Detecting Deception

● We tend to engage in more deception with those with

whom we are less familiar than those we are closer to.
● Our ability to detect lies from facial expressions and
other nonverbal behavior is surprisingly weak, despite
Detecting Deception
what we see in popular television dramas.
● Despite the frequency of lying, we are not particularly
good at differentiating truths from lies when given only
nonverbal cues.

Administers a lie detector to Ben Stiller in Meet the

Robert DeNiro
Parents.

5.3.7 Four Cognitive Illusions

A common thinking error or thinking trap Cognitive Illusions

A false belief that one can control or influence random or

Illusion of Control
chance events.

A false belief that the outcome of a random event is

Gambler’s Fallacy
dependent on previous outcomes of the same event.

A belief that identical random outcomes are “streaks’’. Hot Hand Illusion

An overestimation about the extent to which two variables

Illusory Correlation
are related to one another.

5.4 Attributions: Determining the Causes of Behavior

Judgment about the cause of behavior. Used in
psychology which deals with how individuals perceive the
Attributions
causes of everyday experience, as being either external
or internal.

In the 1970s, he argued that people typically focus on

dispositional factors and ignore situational ones, thus Social Psychologist Lee
committing what he called the fundamental attribution Ross
error.

He calls this attributional process the “rocky road from

acts to dispositions,” because it is fraught with
obstacles and pitfalls that can lead one away from the Edward Jones
correct attributional path that would take both personal
and situational factors into account

● In a classic experiment, participants were asked to

report the true attitudes of students who had written
essays.
● In addition, participants assumed that the students Pro-Fidel Castro or anti-
who chose which position to take held the attitudes Fidel Castro sentiments
expressed in their essays: that the authors of the pro-
Castro essays actually supported Castro and those of
the anti-Castro essays did not.

5.4.1. Two Attributional Biases

Attributing behavior to dispositional factors, while ignoring

situational ones. This an error because it violated the
Fundamental Attribution
assumption that both personal and situational factors are
Error
implicated in the production of social behavior and
described it as fundamental.

The attributions for a person’s behavior vary according to Actor/Observer Effect

whether one is the actor (doing the behavior) or an
 observer (of the behavior). Actors are more likely to focus
on situational explanations for their own behavior,
whereas observers tend to emphasize dispositional ones.

5.4.2. The Correspondence Bias in Attributions

Tendency to assume that outward behavior corresponds

Correspondence Bias
to inward attitudes and to ignore situational influences

Provides a useful way of distinguishing among various

Covariation Matrix
possible causes of a particular event or behavior