Chapter 4
Social Perception:
How We Come to
Understand Other People
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Prepared By
Fred W. Whitford
Montana State University
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Social Perception
Social perception is defined as the
study of how we form impressions of
and make inferences about other
people.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Chapter Outline
I. Nonverbal Behavior
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Nonverbal Behavior
Nonverbal communication is defined
as the way in which people
communicate, intentionally or
unintentionally, without words.
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Nonverbal Behavior
Nonverbal behavior is used to
express emotion, convey attitudes,
communicate personality traits, and
to facilitate or modify verbal
communication.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Facial Expressions
Charles Darwin believed that human
emotional expressions are universal -- that
all humans encode and decode expressions
in the same way.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Facial Expressions
Modern research suggests that Darwin was
right for the six major emotional
expressions: anger, happiness, surprise,
fear, disgust, and sadness.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Facial Expressions
Affective blend is a facial expression in
which one part of the face registers one
emotion while another part registers a
different emotion.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Facial Expressions
Current research examines whether other
emotions have distinct and universal facial
expressions associated with them.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Culture and Channels of Nonverbal
Communications
Culture also influences emotional
expression; display rules that are unique to
each culture dictate when different
nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to
display.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Culture and Channels of Nonverbal
Communications
Emblems are nonverbal gestures that have
well understood definitions within a given
culture.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Multichannel Nonverbal
Communication
In everyday life, we usually receive
information from multiple channels
simultaneously.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Gender Differences in Nonverbal
Communication
Women are better than men at both
decoding and encoding nonverbal behavior
if people are telling the truth. Men, however,
are better at detecting lies.
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Nonverbal Behavior
• Gender Differences in Nonverbal
Communication
This finding can be explained by social-role
theory, which claims that sex differences in
social behavior are due to society’s division
of labor between the sexes.
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Chapter Outline
II. Implicit Personality Theories:
Filling in the Blanks
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Implicit Personality Theories
An implicit personality theory is a
type of schema people use to group
various kinds of personality traits
together. Using these theories helps
us form well-developed impressions
of other people quickly.
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Implicit Personality Theories
• Culture in Implicit Personality
Theories
Hoffman and colleagues (1986) found that
cultural implicit personality theories affect
how people form impressions of others.
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Chapter Outline
III. Causal Attribution: Answering
the “Why” Question
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Causal Attribution
Although nonverbal behavior may be
relatively easy to decode, there is
still substantial ambiguity about why
people act the way they do.
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Causal Attribution
• The Nature of the Attribution Process
Attribution theory is a description of
the way in which people explain the
causes of their own and other people’s
behavior.
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Causal Attribution
• The Nature of the Attribution Process
Fritz Heider is considered the father of
attribution theory. He believed that people
are like amateur scientists, trying to
understand other people’s behavior by
piecing together information until they
arrive at a reasonable cause.
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Causal Attribution
• The Nature of the Attribution Process
He proposed a simple dichotomy for
people’s explanations: internal attributions
and external attributions.
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Causal Attribution
• The Covariation Model: Internal
Versus External Attributions
The covariation model states that in order to form
an attribution about what caused a person’s
behavior, we systematically note the pattern
between the presence (or absence) of possible
causal factors and focus on the consensus
information, distinctiveness information, and
consistency information we gather from the
situation.
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Causal Attribution
• The Covariation Model: Internal
Versus External Attributions
According to the covariation model,
consensus information is the information
regarding how other people besides the
actor treat the target.
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Causal Attribution
• The Covariation Model: Internal
Versus External Attributions
Distinctiveness information is the
information about how the actor treats other
people besides the target, and consistency
information is the information about how the
actor treats the target across time and
different situations.
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Causal Attribution
• The Covariation Model: Internal
Versus External Attributions
People are most likely to make an internal attribution
(attribute the behavior to the actor) when consensus
and distinctiveness are low but consistency is high;
they are most likely to make an external attribution
(attribute the behavior to the target and/or situation)
when consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency
are all high.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Causal Attribution
• The Covariation Model: Internal
Versus External Attributions
The covariation model assumes that
people make causal attributions in a
rational, logical fashion.
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Causal Attribution
• The Covariation Model: Internal Versus
External Attributions
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
The correspondence bias is the tendency
to infer that people’s behavior
corresponds to (matches) their disposition
(personality).
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
The fundamental attribution error is the
tendency to overestimate the extent to
which a person’s behavior is due to
internal, dispositional factors and to
underestimate the role of situational
factors.
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
One reason people make the fundamental
attribution error is that observers focus
their attention on actors, while the
situational causes of the actor’s behavior
are less salient and may be unknown.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
Perceptual salience, or the information
that is the focus of people’s attention,
helps explain why the fundamental
attribution error is prevalent.
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
The Two-Step Process of Attribution occurs
when people analyze another person’s
behavior by first making an automatic
internal attribution, and only then thinking
about possible situational reasons for the
behavior, after which one may adjust original
internal attribution.
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
The spotlight effect is the tendency to
overestimate the extent to which our
actions and appearance are salient to
others.
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Causal Attribution
• The Correspondence Bias: People as
Personality Psychologists
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Causal Attribution
• The Actor/Observer Difference
The actor/observer difference is the
tendency to see other people’s behavior
as dispositionally caused, but focusing
more on the role of situational factors
when explaining one’s own behavior.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Causal Attribution
• The Actor/Observer Difference
One reason for the actor/observer
difference is perceptual salience: actors
notice the situations around them that
influence them to act, while observers
notice the actors.
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Causal Attribution
• The Actor/Observer Difference
The actor/observer difference also occurs
because actors have more information
about themselves than do observers.
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Causal Attribution
• Self-Serving Attributions
Self-serving attributions are explanations
for one’s successes that credit internal,
dispositional factors and explanations for
one’s failures that blame external,
situational factors.
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Causal Attribution
• Self-Serving Attributions
Defensive attributions are explanations
for behavior or outcomes that avoid
feelings of vulnerability and mortality.
Unrealistic optimism is a form of
defensive attribution wherein people think
that good things are more likely to happen
to them than to their peers and that
negative events are less likely to happen
to them than to their peers.
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Causal Attribution
• Self-Serving Attributions
One way we deal with tragic information
about others is to make it seem like it
could never happen to us. We do it
through the belief in a just world, a form
of defensive attribution wherein people
assume that bad things happen to bad
people, and that good things happen to
good people.
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Chapter Outline
IV. Culture and Attribution
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Culture and Attributions
• Culture and the Correspondence
Bias
The correspondence bias is the inclination to
conclude that people’s behaviors match their
personalities. Although the correspondence
bias is prevalent across cultures, people
from collectivist cultures are more likely than
Westerners are to notice situational
information and to use it to form situational
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Culture and Attributions
• Culture and Other Attribution Biases
Westerners are more prone to the selfserving bias than Easterners are. Defensive
attributions, like the belief in a just world, are
more prevalent in societies where extremes
in wealth and poverty exist. And, the
spotlight effect is more common among
people in individualist cultures compared to
those from collectivist cultures.
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Chapter Outline
V. How Accurate Are Our
Attributions and Impressions?
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How Accurate Are Our
Attributions and Impressions?
Under many circumstances we are
not very accurate, especially
compared to how accurate we think
we are.
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What are the most often used and
diagnostic channels of
nonverbal communication? What
are other channels of nonverbal
communication? What functions
do nonverbal cues serve?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What is the relationship between
encoding and decoding? What
are the six major emotional
expressions that are universally
encoded and decoded?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
What are affect blends? What are
display rules? What are
examples of cross-cultural
differences in display rules?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What are emblems? What are
examples of these?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
Who may be better at decoding
nonverbal cues, extroverts or
introverts, men or women?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
How does the social-role theory
explain gender differences in
encoding and decoding
nonverbal communication?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What is an implicit personality
theory? What are functions of
implicit personality theories?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What is attribution theory? What
does it try to describe and
explain? How do internal
attributions differ from external
ones?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
What is the premise of the covariation
model? What information do we
examine for covariation when we
form attributions? When are people
most likely to make an internal
attribution and an external
attribution according to the
covariation model?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
What is the fundamental
attribution error? Why does it
occur? What is perceptual
salience? What is the two-step
process of attribution? What is
the spotlight effect?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
What is the actor/observer
difference? Why does it occur?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Study Questions
When we form self-serving
attributions to what do we
attribute our successes and our
failures?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
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Study Questions
What are defensive attributions?
What is unrealistic optimism?
What is the belief in a just world?
What functions do these
defensive attributions serve?
Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e
Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.