Social perception

Social perception

1. Constructing an understanding of the social world from the data we get through our senses

2. Attribution Theory

   • observe others behaviours and then infer backward to causes that explain why people act as they do
   • Dispositional attribution
     • Internal state of the person
   • Situational attribution
     • person's environment
   • Inferring Disposition from acts
     • 2 steps
     • Fractors that influenced which effects the person is pursuing
       • Commonality
       • Social desirability
       • Normative Expectations
   • Convariation Model Of Attribution
     • Principal of covariation
       • behaviour cause by action, object, context
         • 3 types of information
           • Consensus
             • Consistency
               • Distinctiveness
   • Attribution for succes and failure
     • Determinants of Attributed Causes
     • Consequences

3. Schemas

   • Categorization
     • perceive stimuli as members of groups or classes rather than as isolated, unique entities
       • compare that person to our prototype of the category
         • prototype
           • abstraction that represents the "typical instance of a class or group
     • Complicated because categories not isolated from one another
   • well-organised structure of cognitions about some social entity such as a person, group, role or event
   • TYPES:
     • Person
       • sel-schemas
         • group schemas
           • role schemas
             • event schemas
               • important recurring social events
             • Captain of a sports team
           • Sterotypes
         • conception of our own characteristics
       • cognitive structures that describe the personalities of others
   • Schemas not always work
     • Schematic Processing
       • Know how to applied a schema to the situation
         • Know what's important
       • Schematic memory
         • Schematic Inference
           • Schematic Judgement
       • Drawbacks

4. Person schemas and group stereotypes

   • Mental maps
   • Implicite Personality theories
     • Halo effect
   • Group Stereotypes
     • Positive and negative
     • stereotype treated
     • Common:
       • Racial
         • ethnic
           • Gender groups
     • Origins
       • 2:
         • build a stereotype by generalising because of a direct experience
           • biased distribution of members into social roles
     • Errors

5. Impression Formation

   • organize diverse information into unified impression of the other person

6. Trait Centrality

   • Trait that has a larger impact on the overall impression we form of that person

7. First impresions

   • especially important and have enduring impact
     • Primary effect
     • Recency effect

8. Self-fulfilling Prophecies

   • Because our actions evoke appropriate reactions from others, our 1st impressions are often confirmed by the reactions of others
   • Heuristics
     • Availability
     • representativeness
     • Anchoring and Adjustment

9. Bias and Error in Attribution

   • Fundamental attribution error
   • Focus-of-attention bias
   • actor-observer difference
     • 2 explanations:
       • different visual perspective
         • different access to information
   • Motivational Bias
     • Self-serving bias