Social Perception
The ways in which people perceive on
another
Making Sense of
Others:
How you form your
judgments
Primacy & Recency Effects
• Primacy Effect – Tendency to make an opinion on
another person based on a first impression.
– If 1st impression positive we’ll be more likely to get to
know them.
– We’ll interpret a person’s future behaviors more
positively if their first impressions was a good one.
• Recency Effect – when people change their
opinions of others based on recent interactions
with them.
Person Perception*
Mental processes we use to form judgments and
draw conclusions about the characteristics and
motives of others
•This is an active & subjective process that occurs in
a interpersonal context that has three components:
•The characteristics of the person you are sizing
up
•Your own characteristics as a perceiver
•The specific situation the process occurs in
Social Categorization*
• Mental process of classifying people into groups
on the basis of their shared characteristics.
• Much of it is automatic and spontaneous, and it
often occurs outside conscious awareness
• Categories are usually broad: gender, race, age,
occupation.
• Using social categories helps us mentally
organize and remember info about others but
may lead to inaccurate conclusions.
 It ignores a person’s unique qualities and makes a
conclusion on very limited information.
Prior Information Effects*
• Mental representations of people (schemas)
can effect our interpretation of them
– Kelley’s study
• students had a guest speaker
• before the speaker came, half got a written bio saying speaker
was “very warm”, half got bio saying speaker was “rather
cold”
• “very warm” group rated guest more positively than “rather
cold” group
Attribution:
Explaining the Causes of
Behavior
Attribution Theory
• We often explain behavior of others
differently than we would our own
behavior
• People tend to give a causal explanation
for someone’s behavior, often by crediting
either the situation or the person’s
disposition or personality
Situational Disposition
• Attributing someone’s actions to the
various factors in the situation
Dispositional Attribution
• Attributing someone’s actions to the
person’s disposition, i.e. their
thoughts, feelings, personality
characteristics, etc.
Effects of Attributions
Attribution Can Lead to Errors
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Fundamental attribution error
Actor-observer discrepancy
Blaming the victim (just-world hypothesis)
Self-serving bias
Self-effacing bias
Fundamental Attribution Error
• Explains how we view OTHER’S behaviors
• The tendency for observers, when analyzing
another’s behavior, to give too much weight to
personality and not enough to situational
variables
• People tend to blame or credit the person more
than the situation.
• It is common in individualistic cultures
Using Attitudes as Ways
to “Justify” Injustice
• Just-world bias*
– a tendency to believe that life is fair, people get what
they deserve and deserve what they get
– it would seem horrible to think that you can be a really
good person and bad things could happen to you
anyway
• Just-world bias leads to “blaming the victim”*
– we explain others’ misfortunes as being their fault,
– e.g., she deserved to be mugged, what was she doing
in that neighborhood anyway?
Actor-Observer Bias
• Explains how we view our OWN behavior
• Attribute personality causes of behavior when
evaluating someone else’s behavior
• Attribute situational when evaluating our own behavior
• We tend to judge a person on their actions we see
whether these are a true reflections of that person or not.
• Why?
– hypothesis 1:
• we know our behavior changes from situation to situation, but we don’t
know this about others
– hypothesis 2:
• when we see others perform an action, we concentrate on actor, not situation
-- when we perform an action, we see environment, not person
– See the Active Psych Demo for more info on this.
Self-Serving Bias
• Tendency to take the credit for
successful outcomes of one’s own
behavior
• Unsuccessful outcomes blamed on
external, situational causes beyond our
control
– Individualistic Cultures do this.
Self-Effacing Bias*
• Modesty bias - involves blaming failure
on internal, personal factors, while
attributing success to external,
situational factors
– Collectivist cultures do this.
– Less likely to commit the fundamental
attribution error
– More likely to attribute the causes of
another person’s behavior to external,
situational factors rather than to internal,
personal