social ll- person perception

social ll- person perception

1. self awareness

   • when we become start thinking of our traits feelings and behaviours we are self aware
   • self awareness develops with age, 18 months= we develop our self identity
     • (Lewis & Brooks, 1978)
     • rouge test putting paint on childs face prior to 18 months and they think it another children
   • different self aspects become active in different social situations
   • The spotlight effect – are we being watched?
     • being etrememly self aware when something embarrassing happens for example believing everyone seen it
     • Wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt at the party, pop;e who wore it overestimated how many people were aware of what they were wearing (Gilovich et al., 2000)
   • The illusion of transparency – can others read our emotions?
     • we believe everyone can read our emotions but reality is people can't
     • (Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003) investigated this through teaching i to undergraduates to show audience in public speaking probably won't notice how nervous they are

2. the self concept

   • The collective answers to “I am
   • made up of individual self schwas i.e. beliefs
   • Self-schematic on important dimensions (e.g. intelligence, independent, socially aware, fun-loving, ethical etc.)
     • thinga that matter to us focus our attention on others
     • we remember self referent information better
   • self schwas is knowledge you have about yourself

3. The self-reference effect (Kahan & Johnson, 1992)

   • e.g. which character of sex in the city would you most identify with? you would focus more on the next time you watch it and relate to them more and remover what happens to them

4. self perception

   • we learn about who we are in different ways
     • Self perception (Bem 1972)
       • argued introspection is one of the ways we learn about ourselves, be reflecting on whats happened to us, what have we done and why have we done it.
         • very objective no yard stick
     • Social comparison (Festinger 1954)
       • argues we learn about ourselves by comparison with peers giving us objective feedback of who we are as individuals
       • who ou compare yourself can determine how you feel positively and negatively
     • Looking glass self’ (Cooley 1902)
       • direct feedback from others i.e. academic praise
     • self esteem
       • motivated to evaluate ourselves positively
   • how we learn about ourselves

5. the above average effect

   • Rate self higher on subjective (disciplined vs punctual) and socially desirable traits in comparison to average others
     • 86% job performance (Headey & Wearing 1987)
       • people thinking hey are better at their job han co workers
     • Most drivers (even the accident prone) are above average (Guerin 1994)
     • Intelligence, attractiveness, less prejudiced (Wylie 1979)
     • Caring for vs doing more for the environment (White & Plous 1995)
     • do this on traits that are hard to judge
   • cognitively we are carrying out memory searches and confirmation bias

6. person perception

   • knowing about other peoples dispositions and temporary states through their actions
     • i.e. their emotional states present and over time and personality traits
     • we focus on specific traits sometimes based on which traits are most important to us
       • once we have focussed our attentiontion we build stereotypes inferences...
         • do this by selection, organisation and inferring

7. forming impressions of others

   • we firstly data gather by asking ourselves lots of questions about the person i.e. ar they hot or cold?
   • Asch 1946 experiment in which they gave some a list of traits of a made up person and asked them what their impression of the person was
     • he noticed some traits were more important to impression formation in articulr warm and cold
       • showing we don't simply data gather we look for particular central tartest help us organise all the other peripheral traits
       • known as Gestalt model of impression formation
     • kelley 195 done an experiment in which people were asked to rate a guest lecturer
       • some groups wee told the lecturer was cold and some told he was warm
         • this one word changed the overall attitude to the lecturer/lecture more people asked questions when told he was warm
   • further research by Asch (1946) showed that first impressions count by showing when negative traits are heard first a more negative impression of them is gained rather than when the positive traits are heard firs
     • possibble due to two reasons
       • when we first meet someone our guards re down and we see their true self
       • at the start we are very focussed on them and pay moree attention
   • personality traits and faces
     • rait impressions are made within 100ms and can affect how we treat them (Willis & Todorov 2006)
       • such as aggression anger caring
         • if shown for longer our impressios don't change we just become more confident in our original decisions
     • Competent-looking politicians more likely to be elected (Todorov et al 2005)
     • Baby-faced men receive lighter sentences in jail as they apparently look more innocent (Zebrowitz & McDonald 1991)
     • Little & Perret (2007) averaged photos of people scoring high on certain traits to gain images of traits i.e. extraversion, found participants were very accurate a identifying these traits in people

8. biases in impressions

   • negative information
     • negative bias in impression formation
     • negative impression harder to change
     • pay more attention to it made because its unusual and distinctive or signals potential danger
   • schemas
     • our knowledge of how people tick helps us categorise them
     • implicit personality theories
       • ideas we each how people of a certain group behave
         • ie halo effect people who are attractive are more successful etc
     • can be infered from something like names
       • (Harari & McDavid 1973) school teacher asked to grade essays Angeline would always get a grade higher than bertha or madge