PERSON PERCEPTİON: FORMİNG

İMPRESSİONS OF OTHERS
• We continously come across other people and
continuously try to form impressions of them.
• In other words, we try to reach a judgement
about the personality of each or form hypotheses
about what kind of persons they are.
• In this chapter we will see how we form
impressions of people, what kinds of information
we use in arriving at those impressions, how
accurate our impressions are and what biases
affect our impressions.
1
• People form impressions of others on the
basis of following six principles:
• 1. People form impressions of others on the
basis of minimal information and go on to
impute (add) general traits to them.
• 2. When forming impressions people pay
special attention to the most sailent features
of a person which makes the person distinct
or unusual.
2
• 3. Processing infomation about people involves
perceiving some coherent meaning in their behavior.
• To infer the meaning of a person’s behavior we use
the context of it rather than interpreting the behavior
in isolation.
• 4. We organize our perceptions by categorizing or
grouping the stimuli.
• Rather than seing each person as a seperate
individual, we tend to see people as members of
groups.
• A person with a dark blue uniform is perceived as a
policeman for example. 3
• 5. People use their enduring cognitive structures
to explain others’ behaviors.
• When we identify a women as a doctor, we use
our information about doctors more generally to
infer her attributes and the meaning of her
behavior.
• 6. A perceiver’s own needs and personal goals
influence how he or she perceives others.
• For example, the impression you form of
someone you will meet only once is different from
the one you form about your new roommate.
4
 WHAT İNFORMATİON DO WE USE
When Forming Impressions of Others?
• Hearing the voice and seing a photograph of
someone, even hearing his name gives us ideas
about that person’s characteristics.
• When you meet a stranger even just for an
instance you form an impression of him or her
and vice versa.
• With more contact people form fuller and richer
impressions that determine how they will behave
toward each other, how much they will like each
other and whether they will associate together.
5
 Roles
• Roles are informative, rich and well articulated,
summarizing a lot of information across a wide
range of situations.
• When trying to organize information about
people, knowing their social roles is important.
Think of a politician and a professor for example,
and make guesses about what kind of persons
they are.
• Role schemas are more useful for recall than
traits.
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 Physical Cues
• When we are forming impressions of people we use
people’s appearance and behavior to infer qualities
about them.
• For example the observation that a person is wearing
conservative clothes may lead to the imputation of a
variety of characteristics such as being conservative
politically.
• People also use behavior to draw inferences about
people. If we see a student helping an elderly women
across the street we infer that he or she is kind.
• We even infer personality traits from a person’s face.
Baby faced people are generally perceived as warm,
affectionate, honest and weak. And attractive faces
lead to the inference of being also intelligent.
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 Salience
• Those aspects of the perceptual field that stands out
attract people’s attention more than the background.
• This is called figure-ground principle.
• This means that in impression formation salient cues
are used most heavily. For instance, the only girl in the
class wearing a vivid red cloth.
• Then, what determines the salience of a cue as
opposed to others?
• According to Gestalt principles, the most powerful
conditions that make cues stand out or salient are
brightness, noisiness, motion, and novelty. Examples:
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• Salience has a number of consequences for
perception:
• 1. Salient behaviors draw more attention than do
subtler, less obvious ones.
• 2. Salience influences perceptions of causality. More
salient people are seen as having more influence over
their social context. The student who sits infront of the
lecturer and asks an occational question is more likely
to be perceived as dominating the discussion than the
one who sits at the back and contributes as much.
• 3. Because salient stimuli draw most attention, they
also lead to extreem evaluative judgements.
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 From Behaviors to Traits
• People make quick personality trait inferences
about what the person is like from observable
information such as, appearance, behavior, and
even gestures.
• Referring to traits is more economical and general
way of describing a person than is referring to
behaviors.
• Describe for example your best friend by refferring
to his behaviors and then describe him or her by
referring to personality traits.
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• The fact that we go so quickly from behaviors to
traits is related to the fact that traits imply each
other.
• Observing a person patting a dog in a friendly
manner, people may infer that he or she is kind,
and from inference of kindness we may infer that
he or she is friendly, warm and helpful.
• People think, consciously or unconsciously some
personality traits go together or fit together. This
tought is called implicit personality theory.
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• Thus, from a very simple behavior we can infer
almost a whole personality
• Central Traits. A trait that is highly associated
with many of a person’s other characteristics
is called a central trait.
• For example the pair of traits «warm-cold»
seems to be associated with a lot more other
characteristics whereas the pair «polite-blunt»
is associated with fewer.

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• To show the difference, in importance, among some
traits Kelley (1950) gave students in psychology
courses personality trait descriptions of a guest
lecturer before he spoke.
• Half the subjects received a description containing the
word «warm» and the other half were told the
speaker was «cold». In all other respects, the lists were
identical.
• Then the lecturer came into the class and led a
discussion for about 20 minutes, after which students
were asked to give their impressions of him.
• There were great difference between the
impressions given by the two groups.
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• Effects of «warm» and «cold» descriptions on
ratings of others' qualities
İnstruction
Quality Warm Cold
Self-centered 6.3 9.6
Unsociable 5.6 10.4
Unpopular 4.0 7.4
Formal 6.3 9.6
Irritable 9.4 12.0
Humorless 8.3 11.7
Ruthless 8.6 11.0
The higher the rating, the more the person was
perceived as having the quality.
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• Furthermore, those students who expected the
speaker to be warm tended to interact with him
more freely and to initiate more conversations
with him.
• Different discriptions effected not only the
students’ impressions but also their behavior
toward the speaker.
• People tend to evaluate others in terms of both
task-related qualities or intellectual competencies
and their interpersonal or social qualities.
15
 Categorization
• We immediately and spontaneously group or
categorize people on the basis of gender, etnicity,
social class and race. This categorization too effects
our perceptions.
• For example, you hear two men on the street
talking about insecticides, wheat, barley, potatoes
etc. and you do not see them as just other human
beings, you immediately categorize them as
farmers.

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• Consequences of Categorization
1. Categorization may lead to social judgements
about a person that are consistent with the category-
based stereotype.
2. Categorizing a person speeds information-
processing.
Information consistent with the prototype
(grandmother, young women, senior citizen) is
processed faster than is information inconsistent
with it.
For exampel, «kindly» and aggressive for the
prototype «grandmother.» (Dull and Lui, 1981).
17
 3. Categorizing a person into a group may change
the way in which people process information about
that person.
When we form impressions about individuals in
isolation we tend to use a piece by piece approach
in which we examine individual pieces of
information and form it into an overall impression.
If we see a person as a member of a group, on
the other hand, often our impression of the person
is based on that category, and the person’s
individual characteristics are assimilated into the
overall impression we have about that category.
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• In short, people seem to have a preference for
category-based judgements over piecemeal or
individuated judgements because category-
based evaluations are simpler and more
efficient: they draw on (are based on) our
already-existing impressions about social
groups.

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 The Continuum Model of Impression
Formation
• People’s impressions of others can vary between
stereotypical, category-based impressions and
much more individuated impressions based on
information about particular behaviors.
• This distinction has been called dual processing.
• Under conditions when people need or are
motivated to form impressions quickly, they often
use their schematic, stereotypic and category-
based modes of inference to form their
impressions of others
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• Usually people make category-based inferences
before they process individual information because
it is easy to do so and because the cues that
suggest categories (such as sex or race) are often
highly salient.
• Under conditions that motivate people to learn
about an individual, impressions are constructed
piecemeal from the available data.
• When efforts to understand another person via
categories fail we also turn to individuated
processing. When a shephard listens Mozart and
plays sacsaphon for example.
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• Sometimes we use heuristics to decide what kind
of impression we should form of a person.
• A heuristic is a rule of thumb (sağ duyu kuralı) that
reduces complex information to a single cue. The
informal guideline that any man who wears a gold
chain is sleazy (dummy) would be a heuristic.
• When 1) people need to be accurate, 2) if the
person does not fit their categories or 3) if they
have other reasons for wanting to know the
person more througly, they construct their
impressions in a systematic, piece by piece
fashion.
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 Context Effects
Social perception or social judgement is also strongly
effected by the context in which it is made. There are two
main types of contextual effects on social judgement.
1. Contrast effect is a biasing effect on social judgements
away from the environmental context. For example,
photographs of faces are rated as much less attractive when
they are preceded by a very attractive face.
2. Assimilation effect is biasing of a judgement in the
same direction as a contextual standard. For example,
simultaneously presenting a highly attractive person and a less
attractive one tends to produce more favorable ratings for the
less attractive face than if the highly attractive face is not
present for comparison.

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• Social context is itself informative about
impressions.
• When we receive information about another
person’s traits and behaviors we often focus on
the pragmatic implications of the information.
That is, we focus on why the information was
conveyed.
• For example, if your roommate tells you
something negative about a mutual friend, it may
change your impression of that friend a little but it
will also cause you to question why your rommate
have said it.
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• Therefore, information about another person
does not always have the same impact.
• It depends on the context in which it is delivered
and the purpose that is discerned (inferred) for
its delivery.
• For many behaviors, the importance of context
information may not be appreciated.
• Context may be subtle and so when the perceiver
attempts to infer the characteristics of a target
person, he or she may not observe the role
context or situation plays in the behavior.
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 INTEGRATİNG İMPRESSİONS
• Then, how we combine all of these seperate
inferences about a person into an overall
impression?

26
 Evaluation
• The most important and powerful aspect of
impression formation is evaluation.
• The evaluative dimension is the most
important of a small number of basic
dimensions that organize our unified
impressions of other people.

27
Negativity Effect. Negative or potentially
threatening information carry more weight during
impression formation.
In other words, a negative trait affects an
impression more than a positive trait, everything
else being equal. This is called the negativity effect.
The explanation for this effect is that negative
traits are more unusual and thus more distinctive.
Therfore they are given more weight.

28
• Positivity Bias. In person perception the tendency
to evaluate others positively is called positivity
bias.
• In one study (Sears, 198a), students rated 97 % of
their professors in college favorably (above
«average» on a scale) despite all the mixed
experiences students have in their college classes.
• Then, how can we reconcile the positivity bias
with the negativity bias? In reality, they work
together.
• The reason we feel positively about most people is
that most of their behaviors are positive.
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• People act in a generally good way toward
each other, and situational norms dictate that
people will behave appropriately in social
situations.
• In addition, when we have positive
expectations about others, we tend to test
those expectations and remember positive
information better.

30
• Negative information which initially attracts
attention, often leads people to ignore or
reject other people.
• As a result, we may limit both our contact
with them and whatever information we
might otherwise learn about them.
• Naturally optimistic people seem to have a
stronger attentional bias for positive stimuli
and thus may exibit the positivity bias more.

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• Emotional information. Furthermore, people
notice emotionally charged information and
make great use of it in their judgements about
others.
• In other words, they infer what others are like
from the emotions they express.
• It is very difficult to ignore emotional
information when perceiving others.

32
• The emotion being communicated by a target too
influences information processing.
• In one study (Ottati et al. 1997), the subjects saw
videotape of a person who was in a neutral, happy or
angry mood. The happy mood elicited rapid, heuristic,
stereotypic processing of the person’s characteristics,
whereas the neutral mood elicited more systematic
processing of the information conveyed by the target.
Angry mood led to a processing style between these
extreemes.
• But when the perceivers are higly accountable
(responsible) for their inferences the process is more
systematic regardles of the emotional cues in the
situation.
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 The Averaging Principle
• Most of people’s perceptions are neither purely
positive nor purely negative. Our impressions are
a mixture of impressions that vary in valence
(power) and contents.
• Then, how do we combine seperate pieces of
information about a person to form a simple
overall impression?
• Our impressions of others seem to form
according to what is called a weighted averaging
principle. 34
• According to this weighted averaging principle,
people form an overall impression by averaging all
traits but giving more weight to those they belive
are most important. alarak genel bir izlenim oluştururlar, ancak en önemlilerine inandıklarına
Bu ağırlıklı ortalama ilkesine göre, insanlar tüm özelliklerin ortalamasını

daha fazla ağırlık verirler.

• For example, let’s say you are looking for a baby

sitter and interviewing candidates.
• You would probably give more weight to
establishig rapport with babies than to intelligence
but if you are looking for an assistant for the
experimental psyhology program of the psyhology
department, it may be the other way around.
35
• Ahmet evaluates his roommate during their first
encounter.
• Indivitual Traits Ahmet’s Evaluation
Hard working + 8
Warm + 10
Honest + 10
Quite fat -5
Messy -8
Overall evaluation 15/5= +3
Overall impression = +3

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 Imputing Meaning

• We try to form meaningful impressions of other

people, rather than to absorb each new
information seperately.
• Our understanding of any new piece of information
depends on the other information we have about
the person.
• Think of the meaning of the word «intelligent» in
the following contexts: an «intelligent, warm and
caring psychologist» and an «intelligent, cold and
ruthless butcher».
• Perceptions of others may undergo a shift of
meaning when placed in a new context. 37
 Imputing Consistency
• We are inclined to form evaluatively consistent
impressions of others even when we have only a few
pieces of information.
• Since evaluation is the most important dimension in
impression formation, it is not surprizing then that we
tend to categorize people as good or bad, not as both.
We may then continue to perceive other traits as
consistent with this basic evaluation.
• This tendency toward evaluative consistency is called
the halo effect. If a person is cold, we assume that he
is also less intelligent, unattractive and humorless.
38
• Resolving Inconsistencies. Not all information
about others is internally consistent.
• For example, you may have an impression of
your roommate as a kind and honest person
and then you may have learned from a mutual
friend that your roommate is selfish and a
snob.
• How incongruent information is incorporated
into an overall impression?

39
 • Information that is incongruent with our impressions
often gets remembered. Why?
• It is remembered because in order to integrate this
ti information into your averall impression of your
rommate, for example, you had to do a lot of work.
• You thought about why the incongruent information
happened, why your roommate might have behaved
that way, whether the mutual friend’s report is
trustworty and so on.
• As a result of this complicated process people go
trough to understand incongruent information, it
comes to play a more important role in their overall
impression than the information consistent with their
impression.
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 Schemas
• Usually people process information concerning
others by using the stereotypes or preconceptions
that they hold about the categories that define
people (like gender and occuppation).
• Another word for these stereotypes or
preconceptions is «schemas.»
• A schema is an organized and structured set of
cognitions, including some knowledge about the
category, some relationships among the various
cognitions about it and some specific examples.
41
• Scheamas help us process complex bodies of
information by simplifying and organizing
them.
• They can help us remember and organize
details, speed up processing time, fill in gaps
in our knowledge and interpret and evaluate
new information.
• There are several types of schemas such as
person schemas, role schemas, event schemas
and others

42
• Person schemas are organized and structured
set of cognitions about people. They can focus
on one particular person, for example Atatürk.
• A schema for Atatürk might include such
elements as his being concerned for
oppressed people, serious about state affairs
and preoccuppied with nations independence.
• Person schemas may also focus on certain
types of people.
• For example, our schema of «extrovert»
might include such elements as «outgoing»,
«enthusiastic», «self-assured» and «social.»
43
• We also have role schemas which are the
organized, abstract concepts we have about
people in a particular role such as professor,
politician, fahther, student, devoted lover and so
on.
• Sometimes these schemas are unrealistic.
• If our schema for «devoted lover» includes
elements such as always understanding, always
supportive, never angry, never selfish and always
warm we could be in trouble. Not very many
people live up to a schema like this.

44
• Some schemas focus on groups. The most known of
these is group stereotype. Group stereotypes
attribute sepectific traits or characteristics to a
particular group of people.
• Other schemas include schemas for group leader
and group fallower.
• Perceivers make inferences about others from the
particular group role they hold.
• For example, being in the leadership role, even
without authority or responsibility, may trigger a role
schema that leads to the assumption of greater
responsibility for group performance.

45
• Prototypes. A prototype is an abstract ideal of
the scheama. When we are making inferences
about another person we frequently draw on the
protype of the schema.
• For example, in our category for actrist we may
have an abstract idea of what the person’s body
type is, with whom she gets together, how she
dresses and how she spends her free time.
• When you categorize a new person as an actrist
you may compare her atributes with those of the
prototype for the schema.
46
• Exemplars. While we learn about the abstract
attributes of categories, we also learn particular
examples of the category we have actually
encountered.
• Then, in many cases, we categorize objects and people
by seeing if they resemble the exemplars we have
stored in that category.
• For example, if you are evaluating a new partner as a
possible long term boyfriend or girlfriend, usually you
compare the person not only with your prototype of
an ideal boyfriend or girlfriend but also with «old
flames,» particular past boyfriends or girl friends who
made your heart beat faster for a time.
47
• When we have very little information in
recognizing and classifying people and objects,
we are most likely to go back to prototypes for
particular categories (what the typical professor is
like).
• When we have little more information, we are
inclined to use both exemplars and prototypes to
understand a person.
• For categories for which we have a lot of
information, we are likely to use our well
developed and formal schemas.
48
MOTİVATED PERSON PERCEPTİON
• So far we have discussed person perception as
if it were a relatively rational process of taking
in information about others and organizing it
according to particular principles.
• Our goals and feelings about people also
influence the information that we collect
about them.

49
 Goals
• One of the factors that influences the
information we gather about other people is
the goals we have for interacting with them.
• When researchers tell the participants either to
form a coherent impression of a person or to
remember seperate pieces of information, they
form more organized impressions in the first
condition then is the case in the second.

50
• Anticipating future interactions with somebody
creates very different social goals from merely trying
to learn about that person.
• In this case people remember more and organize the
impression differently.
• Devine, Sedikides and Fuhrman asked the participants
to learn about five people under different goal
conditions. They either anticipated interacting with
the target, were told to form an impression of the
target, were asked to campare themselves with a
friend, were told to campare themselves with the
target, were asked to compare the target with a friend
or were simply asked to recall the target’s attributes.
The results are shown in the table below.

51
 RECALL
Conditions
Anticip. Form Compa Compa
Recall Interac. Impr. to self to frien Remember
Target 4.38 4.00 3.31 3.38 3.00
Com-
Parison 1.80 2.33 2.53 2.22 2.23
As can be seen, anticipating interactions with the
target in the future led to the greatest recall of the
targets behavior.
52
• The need to be accurate usually produces more
extensive and less biased form of gathering
information about a person.
• Neuberg (1989) asked student subjects to interview a
job candidate. Half were led to expect that the
candidate would be anpleasant the ohter half were
given no expectation, about the interviewee. In
addition, half of each group were encouraged to form
accurate impressions about the target; the other half
of each group were not.

53
• The results showed that:
1. Subjects who did not have the goal of accuracy
formed impressions of the person that were relatively
negative and thus consistent with the expectation they
had been given.
2. But the group that had the goal to be accurate
formed more positive impressions, actively undermining
the expectation they had been given, through their
more extensive and less biased efforts to gather
information about the target.
Thus, the goal to be accurate generally leads to more
through and systematic processing of information than
in conditions without this goal.
54
• Impressions formed by people concerning
another person depend also on the kind of
interactions they anticipate having with that
individual.
• The situation in which the achievement of an
individual’s goal is heavily dependent on the
behavior of another person (outcome
dependency) leads the individual to form a
careful impression.
• In situations where there is not such dependency
people are likely to form their impressions quickly
and casually.
55
• Another powerful goal is communication.
• Sedikides (1990) asked the subjects to form
impressions of a target and then communicate
positive, negative or neutral information about
the person to a third party.
• Communication goals completely determined the
information that was provided to the third
individual so that they overrode the subjects’ own
impressions.
• Subjects reformulated their own impressions in
the direction of positive, negative or neutral
impression they had been instructed to convey. 56
• Dual processing is too relevant here.
• Previously we made the distinction between
1) rapid, heuristically based information
processign and
2) more systematic, piecemal use of
information.
Social perceivers often use rapid, heuristically based
processing when their inferences are not particularly
important to them but they can switch to the more
systematic style of processing when inferences are
important. When for example, choosing a rommate,
looking for a project partner etc.
Circumstances like these foster efforts to form accurate
impressioons.
57
• When we transmit information about another
person we often skip information about mitigating
(hafifletici) circumstances that may have
influenced the behavior and instead present the
behavior as if it represented the characteristics of
the target individual. Our goal is to construct a
simple, easily communicated story.
• The result is that listeners may make more
extreme positive or negative judgements of target
individuals than the tellers do themselves.

58
• Social goals influence person perception and
many of these influences seem to be without
intention or awareness.
• People who have a particular goal when they
interact with another person make inferences
that are consistent with their goals about the
other person, even when they do not intend to
do so or are completely unaware that they are
doing so.

59
 The Perceiver’s Cognitive and
Emotional State
• In person perception extracting information to form
an impression from a person is important. But the
perceiver also contributes to the process of
impression formation.
1. When the perceiver is busy and simultaneously
pursuing other tasks, for example, trying to present
himself well, preparing for some future activitiy,
thinking about somethings at the same time, his
attention can not focus on the person about whom he is
forming an impression.
Under these conditions, we are more likely to see
other people’s qualities as stable and enduring
dispositions. 60
 As you listen to me give an interesting lecture,
you may assume that I am always like this. This bias
occurs because people often fail to take into
account external influences on other’s behavior.
2. One of the factors that affect person
perception is the fact that we all have different
things that we notice in other pople.
One person may focus on attractiveness,
another on intelligence and still another may focus
on dressing.

61
 One of the reasons that the same person can
provoke so many different impressions in others is
that those others are each interested in or engaged
by particular characteristics of the person.
3. Another factor that influences how we react
to or perceive others is whether we see ourselves as
similar to them. Usually seing someone similar to
ourselves is a source of attraction. But when we see
others similar to us in a characteristics that we fear
the reverse may be the case.
62
 4. Sometimes the characteristics we use to
evaluate others are salient in our minds for
reasons having nothing to do with the person
being perceived.
For example, if Burcu has just left her
boyfriend Ahmet, because he is too controlling,
she may evaluate all new dates in terms of how
controlling they seem to be.
This tendency to use an activated trait is
highly resistant to correction.

63
 5. Not everyone goes from the observation of
behavior to trait inferences immediately.
Some people are entity theorists, who believe
that traits are fixed and make global trait
judgements quickly and see them as strong
determinants of behavior.
They are more inclined to see others in terms of
their dispositions or traits.
They pay particular attention to information
consistent with their traits and notice negative
behavior. 64
 They form their impressions of others quite
quickly, at the time they interact with them.
In contrast, some people are incremental
theorists and are more likely to notice and
remember positive behavior and behavior that is
inconsistent with trait impressions.
They are more likely to form their theories
based on their memories of those individuals.
6. Sometimes people use their own internal
states for judging other people and this may bias
their impressions.
65
 When people are aroused, they are inclined to
perceive other people in a more extreme manner
than they do when they are not aroused.
The perceivers’ impressions are also influenced
by their own specific emotiotional state.
Being in a bad mood might lead us to form a
less favorable impression of a person.
Good mood may have the opposite effect.

66
 Mood may influence not only the content of
impressions of others but also the process we
use in forming them.
Specifically, a negative mood make people
more inclined to use piecemeal processing than
categorical processing in impression formation.
People in a positive mood, on the other hand,
use category information and are susceptible to
making strong trait inferences about the causes
of others’ behavior.

67
 ATRIBUTING THE CAUSES OF
BEHAVİOR
• As you know, one of the most important
inferences people make about other people is why
they behave as they do.
• What causes Mehmet not to say good morning to
his best friend Ali?. Why Ayşe said those terrible
things to her boy friend.
• Atribution theory is the approach that tries to
explain when and how people ask «why»
guestions. This theory began with Fritz Heider
(1958).
68
• According to Heider, all human beings have
two strong motives: a) the need to form a
coherent understanding of the world and b)
the need to control the environment.
• To achive this understanding and control we
need to be able to predict how people are
going to behave.
• Otherwise, the world is random, surprising
and incoherent.

69
• But inorder to satisfy these two motives we do not
need to ask «why» questions all the time.
• Many of people’s causal attributions are nearly
automatic, implicit in the impressions we form about
other people and situations.
• People are likely to make causal attributions especially
when something unexpected or unpleasand happens
because, unexpected or negative events create a need
for greater predictability.
• By making causal attributions conserning such events
we restore a sense of predictability and control over
the environment.

70
 Jones and Davis’s Correspondent
Inference Theory
• One of the most important functions of causal
attributions is to explain why people do what they
do. People engage in a variety of actions but only
some of those reveal their personal qualities.
• For example, if your new roommate says good
things about your boy friend her behavior is
unlikely to be very revealing about her.
• Because almost every one knows on the campus
that it is the courteus way to say good things
about other people’s boyfriends.
71
• What information about your roommate will tell
you what she is really like?
• In other words, in what circumstances do we infer
that another person’s actions reveal or reflect real
dispositions such as traits, attitudes and other
internal states and when do we assume that
others are simply responding to the external
situation?
• The terms used to describe these different kinds of
attributions are dispositional or internal
attributions to the person and situational or
external attributions to the environment.
72
• Correspondent inference theory developed by
Jones and Davis (1965) explains how people infer
whether a behavior of a person is caused by that
person’s personal characteristics or by situational
influences.
• In essence, people use the context to infer
whether the behavior is a result of the influence
of the situation, or of an underlying disposition,
such as a trait.

73
• Actions perceived to be reflective of underlying
dispositons lead to corresponding inferences; that
is, they are judged to be meaningful and useful for
illuminating a person’s character.
• An important factor that perceivers use to infer
the causes of another person’s behavior is social
desirability of that behavior.
• Socially undesirable behavior leads people to infer
an underlying disposition, whereas socially
desirable behavior is not clearly revealing of
personal characteristics. 74
• For example, if Özgür knows that self-confidence
is an important requirement and behaves in a self-
confident manner during a job interview, it is
difficult to infer that he is really a self-confident
person or just appearing so, to give a positive
impression.
• On the other hand, if he behaves in the opposite
manner, then, it would be easier for the
interviewer to infer that he is not a self-confident
person.
• Otherwise, why would he behave like this while
the situation calls for different behavior.
75
• In inferring dispositons from a person’s behavior,
another indication is knowing whether the person has
the right to chose the behavior.
• Behavior that is freely chosen is more informative
about a person’s underlying characteristics than is
behavior that is not chosen.
• For example, if I ask you to write an article against
animal rights, your readers would be unwise to infer
that you have anti animal rights attitudes.
• But, on the other hand, if I ask you to write the article
on either side of the issue and you choose to write
against animal rights, then your readers quite
confidently infer that your article reflects your true
attitude.
76
• In inferring the causes of another’s behavior
perceivers consider also the intended effecs or
consequences of that behavior.
• If a behavior produces many effects or
consequences, it is difficult to know the person’s
true motives.
• For example, if a university student who got high
enough points from the university entrance
examination to go to Çankaya University Law
School but instead he chooses to go to
Psychology Department, people easily infer that
what he really wants is psyhology.
77
• The distinctive features of a person’s choise are
often used as a basis for inferring his or her
underlying qualities through what is called «the
analysis of noncommon effects.»
• For example, if you are chosing between two
graduate programs that are equally reputable,
both at good universities that had offered you the
same stipient, and you choose the program that
has an internship, people might infer that training
received during an internship is important to you.

78
• Another factor that can be an indication of
whether a peron’s behavior reflects his or her
dispositional qualities is knowing whether the
behavior is part of a social role.
• Behavior that is constrained by a role, is not
necessarily informing about a person’s underlying
beliefs and attitudes.
• For example, if a primary school teacher helps a
student who has learning difficulties, we do not
suppose that he is a helpful person, he is doing his
job. But if a retired teacher helps this student in
his free times without a fee, then we think he is
helpful. 79
• Finally, we interpret others’ behavior on the basis of
our preexisting expectations.
• For example, suppose that Ayşe’s boy friend is
politically liberal but Ayşe observes his nodding
aggreably at her parents’ conservative statements
over dinner, she may nonetheless, continue to belive
that he is an enthusiastic supporter of liberal politics
and make an external attribution for his nodding,
namely, he is trying to avoid an argument with her
parents.
• In summary, we make causal inferences on the basis of
social desirability of the behavior, whether the
behavior is freely chosen or not, intended effects of
the behavior, knowing whether the behavior is part of
a social role, and preexisting expectations. 80
 Kelley’s Covariation Theory
• As an effort to explain another’s behavior, Harold
Kelley’s covariation model refers to the fact that
people try to see if a particular effect and a
particular cause go together across situations.
• For something to be the cause of behavior, it must
be present when the behavior occurs and absent
when it does not.
• According to Kelley, people use three types of
information to validate their tentative (not certain)
causal attributions: consistency, distinctivenes, and
consensus.
81
• For example, suppose your friend Sema told
you that she watched Cem Yılmaz last night
and she said that he was the funniest
comedian she saw for along time and you
should not miss him.
• Before going to see him, you may want to
know if he is really funny or if there is
something unusual about Sema or about the
situation last night, such as the mood she was
in, the people she was with, or the drinks.

82
• According to Kelley we ask at least there questions
in order to find out the cause of Sema’s behavior,
namely laughing at Cem Yılmaz.
1. Is the behavior distinctive? That is, did Sema
laughed at any comedian, or did she really
laughed hard at this one?
2. Is there a consensus among those who saw
Cem Yılmaz that night? Do they find him very
funny too.
3. Is the behavior consistent? Did Sema
laughed at him only the last night or does she find
him funny in other situations as well.
83
• For an internal attribution, in that, to attribute
Sema’s behavior to herself, there should be low
distinctinctiveness, low consensus and high
consistency: Sema laughs at all comedians, no one
else laughs at this one, and she laughs in a lot of
sitiuations.
• Sema’s behavior can be attributed either to the
person, namely, Sema herself, or to the stimulus
object, that is the comedian, or to the context.

84
• If we are to decide whether Sema’s laughing is
caused by the comedian, her behavior has to
pass three tests: 1) high distinctivness, 2) high
consensus and 3) hihg consistency.
• Her reaction has to be distintive to Cem Yılmaz
and not to others; other people who saw him
have to find him comic too; and she has to
react similarly to him in other situations as
well.

85
Why Mary laughed at the comedian?
Condi- Distinc- Consen- Consis- Most Com
Tion tiveness sus tency mon attrib.
1. High High High Stim. obj. %61
2. Low Low High Person %86
3. High Low Low Context %72

McArthur (1972)

86
• People generally simplify the attribution process,
in that, they assess covariation along just one
factor instead of several.
• Sometimes there are several plausible causal
explanations for behavior and we need guidelines
to see which attribution is correct.
• Kelley proposed a second major principle used for
making causal attributions, called the discounting
principle.

87
• According to the discounpting principle, people
are less likely to attribute an effect to any
particular cause if more than one potential
cause is likely.
• If, for example, a real estate agent is nice to your
father and gives him a ride home your father
may not want to arrive at a conclusion that the
agent is intrinsically friendly.
• He may, instead, suspect that the cause of his
friendliness is his wanting to do business with
him.
88
 Biases in The Attribution Process
• So far, the attribution process is described as fairly
rational and logical one.
• We look at the person’s behavior and reasonably
infer the causes of it from the systematic
knowledge we have about that person and the
circumstances in which the behavior occured.
• But research suggests that the attribution process
is not always rational or logical and there are
several biases in the way we make causal
attributions.
89
• Fundamental attribution error
• As these two theories suggest, in general, we tend
to attribute others’ behaviors to their general
dispositions, in other words, to their personality
traits or attitudes rather than to the sitution they
are in.
• This is to say that we usually make internal
attributions as opposed to external ones
concerning another person’s behavior.
• This tendency is called the fundamental attriution
error.

90
• When we ask a municipal bus driver whether the bus
passes from a certain place or street and if he seems
unpersonal and indifferent we assume that he is a
snob and unfriendly person ignoring the fact that his
whole day passed by answering such questions.
• Jones and Harris (1967) did two experiments that
looked at the attributions about the attitudes of
people who had written essays on a controversial
topic. In this case, an assey about Fidel Castro, the
leader of Cuba at that time. Even when they said that
the writers had been assigned to the essay position
(pro or anti), the subjects overestimated the role of
internal dispositions and underestimated the strength
of the external situation. 91
Attitude Atributed to Writer
Condition Pro-Castro Anti-Castro
Experiment I
Choise 59.6* 17.4
No Choise 44.1 22.9
Experiment II
Choise 55.7 22.9
No Choise 41.3 23.7

*A high score indicates a pro-castro position attributed to the

writer.
Source: Harris and Jones (1967, pp. 6, 10.
92
• Research indicates that attributions of dispositional
qualities to others on the basis of their behavior may
be made spontaneously and without even awareness,
perhaps even automatically when we observe or hear
about these others’ behavior.
• Using information about the situation to qualify
dispositional inferences seems to be part of a second
and more thoughtful stage that involves correcting the
initial inference.
• But, often we do not get to this second stage of
correction unless the contextual informatinon is too
compelling or salient. 93
• When people’s minds are busy with other things,
they also fail to reach the correction phase.
• When they are busy, they focus on the most
salient aspects of the situation and pay less
attention to the nonsalient contextual factors.
• As a result, people are especially likely to make
dispositional attributions for others’ behavior.
When we are not bussy, correction is more likely.
• But most of us cognitively busy, most of the time.

94
• In some circumstances we are more likely to make
situational atrributions:
1. For people we know very well.
2. For people we expect to have contact in the
future.
3. When the situational information is
especially salient and
4. When we do not know the person’s motive for his
or her behavior.
People in Western cultures make more
dispositional attributions than those in East Asian
cultures like Chinese, Japanese and Indian.
95
 The Actor-Observer Effect (Bias).
• An important characteristic of fundamental
attribution error is that it applies when we explain
the behaviors of other people but the reverse is
true when we explain our own behavior.
• That is, we are more likely, as an actor, to
attribute an external or situanal cause to our own
behavior.
• This phenomenan is called actor-observer effect.

96
• Nisbett, Caputo, legant, and Mareck (1972) asked
male university students to write a paragraph on what
they liked most about the women they dated and why
they had chosen their major. Then asked to answer
the same questions as if they were their own best
friends.
• An answer like «I need someone to relax with» would
be an internal attribution, while an answer like «She is
smart and fun.» or «Chemistry is a high paying field»
would be an external one.
• The results showed that the participants gave more
situational reasons for their own behavior and more
dispositional reasons for a friend’s behavior.
97
• Why do actors and observers give different
explanations for the same events?
• One reason is that the actors and observers have
access to different information and may arrive at
different conclusions.
• Actors know more historical information about
their own behavior in different situations than
the observers.
• They know that their behavior has varied from
situaton to situation, whereas the observer has
just one situation to go on. 98
 Actors pay more attention to events that others
can not observe, while observers draw on events
that can be directly observed and that consequently
seem to be the result of personal intention.
Another reason is that the difference may be
due to different perspectives. The visual field of the
observer is filled by the actor, and the special
salience of the actor may lead the observer over
attribute the actor’s behavior to dispositions.
The actor, on the other hand, is looking not at
his or her own behavior, but at the situation and
whatever in it. 99
• The actor’s own behavior is not as salient as it is to
an observer ; instead the situation is more salient
and therfore more causally potent.
• In certain circumstances the actor-observer effect
is weakend.
• For example, when we feel empathy for a person
whose behavior we are observing, we are inclined
to explain the behavior as the other person do.
• And we are more likely to attribute positive
outcomes to dispositional factors and negative
outcomes to situational factors, regardless of
whether they are committed by actors or
observers. 100
 False Consensus
• People tend to assume that everyone else responds
the way as they do. This tendency to overestimate
how common our own behavior is, called false
consensus. We are inclined to think that our own
behavior is typical.
• In one study (Ross et. all., 1977) university students
were asked if they would walk around their campus
for 30 minutes wearing a large sandwich board with
the message «Eat at joes.» Some aggreed and some
refused.
• Both groups estimated that two thirds of other
students on the campus would make the same choise
as they did. Both groups could not be right, could
they? 101
• How can we explain this false consensus effect?
• One reason behind it might be that people usually
tend to be together with others similar to them
and who behave as they do.
• As a result, estimates of the beliefs and behaviors
of others may simply reflect the biased sample of
people one has available for social inference.
• A second possibility is that people’s own opinions
are especially salient so our beliefs about
consensus are increased because our own position
is the only one we are thinking of.
102
• A third possibility of explanation could be that in
trying to predict how we might behave or think in
a certain situation we resolve ambigious details in
our mind that favors a preferred course of action.
• For example, the person who thinks that others
would laugh at him if he wears the sandwich
board will refuse to do it, and think others would
do the same.

103
• A forth explanation might be that people need to
see their own beliefs and behaviors as good,
appropriate, and typical, and so they attribute
them to others to maintain their own self-esteem.
• Concerning certain personal attributes, people
show a false uniqueness effect.
• For example, when people are asked to list their
best abilities and estimate how others stand on
these abilities, they usully underestimate their
peers’ standing. Because people need to feel
distinctive.
104
The Self-Serving Attributional Bias
• If we are successful in someting, we have a
tendency to attribute it to some characteristic of
us such as intelligence, ability, good looks,
personality and so on.
• If, on the other hand, we fail in something we are
inclined to attribute it to something external to us
such as bad luck, powerful others, conditions etc.
• The tendency to take credit for success and deny
responsibility for failure is called self-serving
attributional bias.
105
• In general, there is more evidence that people
take credit for success then they deny
responsibility for failure.
• Sometimes we are willing to accept
responsibility for failure, especially if we can
attribute it to a factor over which we have
control, such as effort. By doing so, we can
preserve the belief that we will not fail in the
future.

106
• The self-serving bias may be quite adaptive, in
that, attributing success to one’s enduring
charcteristics, and failure to external factors may
make people more likely to attempt related tasks
in the future.
• For example, in one study, unemployed workers
who attributed their firings to external factors
made greater efforts to become reemployed and
were actually more likely to find jobs than those
who attributed their firings to their personal
characteristics (Schaufeli, 1988).
107
 Biases: Where Do They Come From?
Why are people biased in the attribution process?
These biases come from a combination of
cognitive and motivational needs.
Some biases represent cognitive shortcuts or heuristics,
ways of cutting through masses of information quickly to reach
a good explanation. To attend to salient stimuli and attribute
other’s behavior to internal dispositions may simply make the
process of causal attribution more rapid and efficient.
Other attributional biases come from people’s efforts
to satisfy their own needs and motives.
The self-serving and false consensus biases enhance
self-esteem and the perception that we control our own lives.
108
 ACCURACY OF JUDGEMENTS
(PERCEPTİONS)
• What can we say about the accurasy of people’s
perceptions of others?
• On the one hand, people must be reasonably
accurate in their judgements of others inorder for
society to function as smoothly as it does.
• On the other hand, having discussed various
evaluative and cognitive biases, to which impression
formation is subject, the research suggests that in
many circumstances our impressions may be quite
inaccurate.
• We perceive external, visible attributes fairly
accurately but inferring internal states, such as traits,
feelings, emotions or personalities is more difficult.109
 Judging Personality
• Research shows that accuracy of perceptions of
personality traits, such as dominance or
sociability compromised by several factors:
• 1. Our perceptions of others are sometimes
determined more by our idiosycratic preferences
for particular personality dimensions than by
attributes of the person being evaluated. For
some people, knowing how intelligent a person is
important, whereas for another person, being
trustworthy or not, might be more important.

110
• 2. It is difficult to measure personality traits and
therefore, it is difficult to establish the proper
criteria for accuracy.
• 3. Another proplem is related to how consistent
people’s personality traits are, especially for
predicting their behavior.
• Often personality traits predict behavior only in a
limited set of circumstances.
• If you cheat in poker and are very honest with your
friends and lecturers, are you an honest or
dishonest person?
111
• Because of the difficulty in establishing criteria for
accuracy, research has focused on when people
aggree about traits of others.
• For example people show a lot of aggrement in
their ratings of whether a person is extroverted or
intelligent but less aggreement on whether the
person is honest or conscientous.
• This is so because the behavioral manifestations
of some traits are especialy observable, but the
behavioral indications of some traits are not.
112
• Accuracy has also been measured by whether a
rater’s perceptions of another person match that
person’s own self-perception.
• For example, if you were asked to rate your
roommate Fatma’s friendliness, your rating would
be compared with Fatma’s own self-rating to
show how much you agree.
• In general, aggreement between peer ratings
and target ratings depends on how good two
people are acquainted.
113
• Accuracy in the perception of the attributes of
another person can be improved if we have
information about the situation in which the
trait occurs.
• For example, if people learn that an individual
has a particular goal in a situation, they are
more likely to make a trait (internal)
attribution from observation of behavior.
114
• People use more idiosyncratic trait definitions
when they are making judgements about
ambigious traits than when they are making
judgements about traits that have lots of
observable referents.
• Forcing people to use the same trait
definition for ambigious traits increases their
aggreement.

115
• Even strangers are able to rate others in a manner
consistent with those others’ self perceptions
after a relatively brief exposure to their
behaviors.
• But stranger-self aggreements are likely to be
seen primarily for behaviors that have many
observable referents such as extroversion,
intelligence and warmth.
• Sharing a cultural background usually leads to
more accurate inferences than if the perceiver
and the perceived come from different cultures.
116
• By inducing empathy in perceivers accuracy of person
perception can be improved because when people feel
empathy for others, they seem to get inside their
heads, see the world as the they see it, and infer the
contend of their thoughts and feelings more
accurately.
• The most consensus about a target’s attributes is
found when perceivers share information about
targets who behave consistently accross situations or
when perceivers are judging behavior in the same
situation.
• The lowest consensus is seen when perceivers do not
communicate with each other and have different
kinds of information about targets who behave
differently in different situations.
117
• People are more likely to agree on another
person’s characteristics if that person’s behavior is
not overly variable.
• The same is true when peoples’ outcomes are
dependent on their inferences.
• However, and unfortunately, when we attempt to
predict future behavior we do rather badly.
• In general, people are overconfident about
predicting the behaviors of both other people and
themselves.
118
• Inaccuracy of the predictions of future behavior
appear to stem from two factors.
• First, when people express high confidence, it is
rarely appropriate or warranted. As confidence
increases, the gap between accuracy and
confidence widens.
• For example, in one study California college
students were asked to indicate how likely it was
that their roommate will take his or her first job in
California. Many of them expressed high
confidence that this will happen. Many of them
were wrong.
119
• They were wrong because finding and accepting a
first job depends on many factors in addition to
the geographic locale in which one wants to live.
• Second, the accuracy of predictions concerning
future behavior was low because predictions that
are statistically unlikely are rarely accurate.
• For example, when asked how likely it was that
most of their close university friends would be
from outside their dorm, those who said «highly
likely» were usually wrong. Because people
usually form friendships on the basis of
proximity..
120
• Research suggest that people are not particularly
accurate in perceiving other people, but it seems
they are accurate enough.
• Evidence show that people achive pragmatic
accuracy, that is, accuracy that enables them to
achieve relationship goals.
• For example, romantic partners are quite accurate
about each other on personal characteristics that
are relavent to the relationship but may be less so
on attributes that are less relevant to the
relationship. 121
 Recognition of Emotions
• How accurately do we perceive the emotions of other
people? Whether they are happy or afraid, horrified or
disgusted?
• In a typical study concerning the accuracy of
perceptions of emotions, a person is presented with a
set of photographs of people portraying different
emotions and asked to judge what those emotions are.
• More recent studies used videotaped clips of
emotional reactions.
• The evidence shows that there is almost a universal
recognition of several facial expressions of emotion in
both literate and preliterate cultures. 122
• In 1871 Charles Darwin proposed, on the basis of
his evolutionary theory, that facial expressions
convey the same emotional states in all cultures.
• He argued that universal expressions have
evolved because they have great survival value:
They allow people to communicate emotions and
so control the behavior of others.
• Virtually all species of Old World monkeys and
apes have been found to use facial gestures to
signal dominance or submission.
123
• Differing eyebrow positions are crucial:
Usually brows are lowered on dominant or
threathening individuals and raised on
submissive or receptive animals.
Craig and Patrick (1985) induced pain by
immersing participants’ hands in icy water at
freezing temprature. They found consistent
responses across cultures such as raising cheeks
and tightening the eyelids, raising the upper
eyelids, parting the lips, and closing the eyes or
blingking.
124
• The evolutionary explanation is that there
may be a link between the facial expressions
used by subhuman primates to communicate
with and control other species’ members and
used by humans for the same purpose.
• If this is true, presumably the same link
between emotion and facial expression would
exist among humans acroos all (or most)
cultures.

125
• But not all emotions can be discriminated
well.
• People typically disdinguish the major groups
of emotions using facial cues.
• According to Woodworth (938) emotions can
be arranged on a continium; the relationship
between any two emotions is distinguished by
the distance between them along this
continium.

126
• Woodwort’s continium of emotions:
1. Happiness, Joy
2. Surprize, amazement
3. Fear
4. Sadness
5. Anger
6. Disgust, contempt
7. Interest, attentiveness
We seem to be quite good at distinguishing
emotions taht are 3,4 or 5 points apart. 127
• But it is very difficult to discriminate emotions
in the same category or one category away
such as happiness and surprize.
• Two main dimensions of emotional expression
are pleasantness and arousal and people are
reasonable judges of emotional states that
these dimensions form.
For example, positive emotions such as
excitement and happiness are easily distinguished
from negative ones such as fear, anger and disgust.
1
2
8
• Among the positive emotions, arousing ones
such as excitement can be distinguished from
nonarousing ones such as contentment.
• Similarly, negative arousing emotions such as
fear and anger can be distinguished from
nonarousing ones such as sadness.
• On the wohe, though, the pleasentness
dimention is more easily distinguished than
the arousal dimention.

129
 NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION

• Much of our communication is verbal, but we communicate

nonverbally as well.
• We use nonverbal behavior to communicate dominance,
sympathy, or liking.
• Often we are completely unaware of what we are
communicating to others and, in turn, learning about them
through these nonverbal cues.
• But, in reality, much communication occurs nonverbally and
the effects of nonverbal communication on impressions of
others can be extreemely potent.
130
• Although there seems to be an almost universal
recognition of certain emotions, there are also
important differences among cultures. Not every
emotion is communicated the same way in every
culture.
• In addition, research shows that people are generally
more accurate at judging emotions when those
emotions are expressed by members of their own
culture than when they are expressed by members of
a different culture.

131
• In general, people communicate information
about themselves through three main channels:
1. Verbal communication: the verbal content
of what a person says.
2. Visible nonverbal channel which includes
such features as facial expression
gesture, posture and appearence.
3. Paralinguistic nonverbal channel, that is, the
remainder of speech signals when the content
has been removed, such as the pitch,
amplitude, rate, voice quality an contour of
speech.
132
 The Visible Nonverbal Channel
• Some of the main nonverbal cues of the visible channel are
expressed through distance, gesture, and eye contact. This
is called body language.
Distance
• As the friendship and intimacy between two persons
increases they stand nearer to each other.
• Friends stand closer than strangers, those who are sexually
attracted to each other stand closer than those who are not
attracted to each other sexually.
• Standing close is usually a sign of friendship and interest.
• It may be one of the most important and easiest ways of
telling someone you have just met that you like him.

133
• Gestures
• Gestures and posture convey information to
others.
• Many bodily movements carry specific
information or directions. For example, the
gestures for «stop» and «come»; gestures for
«sit down,» «yes,» «no,» «go away» and
«goodby.»
• Various obscene gestures have well known
meanings. All these gestures are a sign
language.
134
• Gestures have meaning mainly when
observers and participants understand the
context and especially when they understand
the culture.
• An open palm is not always an invitation.
• The meaning of gestures depends on context,
on the person doing the action, on the
culture, and on the recipient of the
communication.

135
• Eye Contact
• An important and interesting way of
nonverbal communication is through eye
contact and it’s meaning differs greatly,
depending on the context.
• Eye contact indicates interest or lack of it.
• In movies couples stare into each other’s eye
to portray love, affection, or great concern.

136
• In other cases, a stare may be a challenge or a
threat.
• Therefore eye contact can have appearently
contradictory meanings, friendship or threat.
• In both cases, it indicates greater involvement
and higher emotional content. Whether the
emotion is positive or negative depends on the
context.
• Except when conveying bad news, avoiding or
breaking eye contact is usually a sign that the
person is not interested.

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• Facial Expressions
• Facial expressions can also be forms of
communication conveying warmt, sympaty,
confusion or anger, for example.
• A smile, depending on the context, may mean
support, encouragement and looking down on
somebody.
• A particularly interesting aspect of facial
communication is mimicry. According to Darwin
people mimic distress when others are feeling
it.
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• Mimicry may be an expression of sympathy for the wictim: an
indication of sharing the pain.
• It may also be an unconscious strategy that people
spontaneously engage in to get along with the people with
whom they interact.
• Bavelas and his associates (1986) tested this idea. They had
undergraduate women view a person who dropped a heavy
TV monitor on an already injured finger. In some cases, the
wictim who was a confederate, then looked directly at the
observer; in other cases, no eye contact was made. Most of
the observers in turn displayed an expression of pain, but it
quickly faded in the absence of eye contact. Moreover, the
observers were considerably more likely to smile when eye
contact was made, which may be an effort of reassuring.
• People are especially likely to mimic others if they are
especially attentive to the people around them and the
context in which their behavior occurs.

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• Paralanguage
• Paralanguage can be defined as the variations in
speech other than the verbal content.
• Paralanguage can cary a great deal of meaning,
especially emotional meaning. Voice pitch,
loudness, rhythm, inflection, and hesitations
convey information.
• A simple statement as, «You want to be a doctor?
can mean entirely different things depending on
emphasis and inflection. Say it with different
inflections.

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• Multiple Channels
• We talked about verbal, visible or paralinguistic
channels of communication. Typically, and as
might be expected, we tend to form more
accurate impressions of others when we have
access to all channels of communication
• But, in general, the verbal chanel seems to be
much more influential for inferences about
people.
• However, the question of which chanel
communicates most powerfully becomes
important when the observer is receiving
conflicting cues from different channels. We will
discuss this issue next. 141
 THE PROBLEM OF DECEPTİON
• An especially important area of conflict between
verbal and non verbal cues is judging when
people are lying or otherwise trying to deceive
observers.
• Police, judges and jurors are constantly trying to
learn the truth from people who try to deceive
them.
• One study (DePoulo et. all.,1996) shows that
college students tell about two lies a day, during
the course of normal social interactions.
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• Nonverbal Leakage
• Even when they are successful in lying
verbally, people sometimes betray the fact
that they are lying or otherwise trying to
deceive observers.
• People attend more to what they are doing
with their bodies, which may lead to
nonverbal leakage.

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• In other words, true emotions can «leak out»
even when a person tries to conceal them.
• For example, one of you may say that she is not
nerveous about taking an exam but may bite her
lower lip and blink more than usual. These are
the cues that usually indicate nerveousness.
• Liars betray themselves often through
paralinguistic expressions of anxiety, tension and
nerveousness.

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• In general, the voice is higher when someone is
lying than when he or she is telling the truth. The
difference is so small that an individual can not
tell simply by listening; however electronic vocal
analysis reveals lying with considerable accuracy.
• Shorter answers, longer delays, more speech
errors, more nerveous less serios answers and
weird nonverbal behavior such as arm raising or
head tilting are all characteristics of people who
are perceived as liars or who are instructed to tell
lies.

145
• Some nonverbal channells leak more than others
because they are less controllable.
• Several studies have found that body is more likely
than face to reveal deception.
• Paralinguistic cues can also leak because, like the
body, tone of voice is less controllable than is
facial expression.
• The tendency to engage in nonverbal leakage
seems to be fairly consistent across situations
because people who are perceived to be truthful
by others tend to be seen this way across multiple
situations.
146
 Accuracy in Detecting Deception
• People, as perceivers, consistently perceive deceptive
messages as somewhat less truthful than truthful
messages, but rarely by an impressive margin.
• Lies are easiest to detect when they are apparently
motivated by ingratiation such as communicating false
aggreement with an attractive partner of the opposite
sex.
• Deception is harder to detect when the motive is
unknown. Moreover, detecting deception is
undermined by many of the person-perception biases
ve discussed such as the positivitiy bias.

147
• Does it help to be warned explicitly that a target person may
be lying?
• Contrary to expectations, not much.
• Torris an DePaulo, in a study involving simulated job
interviews, told the «applicants» to be honest in some cases
and dishonest in others, whereas, the «interviewers» were
told to expect the applicant to try to convey fals impressions
in some cases or given no warning.
• Compared with interviewers who had not been warned to
anticipate dishonest behavior, the warned interviewers
perceived all applicants as more deceptive and they were
no more accurate than the unwarned interviewers in
singling out dishonest applicants from the honest ones.
Moreover, they were less confident of their judgements
than the unwarned ones.
148
• People may be somewhat better at discerning
deception when they are less involved. Highly
involved participants tend to process people’s
messages carefully and they, therfore, attend
more to verbal message, whereas, less involved
ones are more likely to attend to peripheral cues
and nonverbal behavior.
• But, very often, we may not be especially
motivated to notice whether a person is lying or
not.
• In most social situations, deceptive self-
presentations are likely to be taken at face value.
149
 The Giveaways
• When observers are able to discover deception
what cues do they use? Is the body less
controllable than the face, and do people catch
deception mainly through nonverbal bodily cues?
Or is the voice (pitch, loudnes, and speed) an
even more leakier channel than the body?
• Research shows that all of these help to expose a
potentially deceptive communicator.
• But, they are useful only when the observer has
also access to the content of the person’s speech.
150
• Liars blink more, hesitate more, and make
more errors when they are speaking.
• They tend to speak in higher pitched voices,
and their pupils are more likely to be dilated.
• Liars are more likely to feel guilty or anxious,
and this may explain why liars fidget more,
speak more hasitatingly and less fluidly, and
make more negative and distancing
statements than those telling the truth.

151
• In liars interchannel discrepancies are seen more.
• Linguistic cues may also giveaway the fact of
lying. Liars describe events in less cognitively
complex terms and use fewer references to
themselves and to other people.
• Paradoxically, one of the best sources of
information regarding deception may be the
sender’s motivation to get away. Because when
liars try to get away with their lies they actually
become more obvious to observers.
152
 Nonverbal Behavior and Self-
Presentation
• Over a life time, we learn a great deal about
the self-presentation of nonverbal behavior.
• For example by the time we are in college, we
may not have to think much about the fact
that we should stop fidgeting, make extended
eye contact, and look sympathetic when
another person is telling us a problem.

153
• Cultural display rules govern not only which
emotion should be conveyed in a particular
situation but also how the emotions should be
conveyed.
• Nonverbal behavior can also be used to further
social goals. When he is talking to the women he
wishes to date, a man may smile a great deal,
make extended eye contact, stand fairly close
and put his hand against the wall behind his
intended partner.

154
 Gender
• In terms of using nonverbal behavior effectively
there are differences among people.
• Girls an women tend to be more expressive,
more involved in their personal interactions and
more open in the expression of emotion.
• They tend to use more nonverbal behavior when
interacting with others such as, touching, eye
contact, expressive body movements, smiling and
gazing.
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• Women are also more accurate interpreters of
nonverbal cues than are men.
• There are, in addition, gender differences in
the communication of diffent emotions.
Women are better in communicating
hapiness, whereas men are better in
communicating anger.

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