week 3 perceiving others

• Thin slice accuracy

  the ability to make accurate judgments about people or situations based on very limited information, often within a few seconds or minutes
• We can pick up a lot of meaningful information in a short amount of time!
• Judgments of faces


  • Trustworthy
  • Competent
  • Likeable
  • Aggressive
  • Attractive
  • Consensus in judgments across perceivers
• A follow-up study found that clinical psychologists who were interested in deception were also quite accurate at detecting lies (Ekman, O'Sullivan, & Frank, 1999)
• People aren't very good at judging truth and deception, even those with relevant training
• Why people aren't good at detecting lies

  • They tend to focus too much on faces
  • A lot of available cues aren't good indicators
• What helps detect lies

  • Voice (hesitate, then speed up/raise pitch)
  • Cognitive effort (lying is harder, so easier to detect if you add a cognitive challenge, e.g. tell a story backwards)
• Attribution


  How people explain the causes of behaviour
• People are naïve psychologists (Heider, 1958)
• Personal attribution


  An internal characteristic of the person caused the behaviour (e.g., ability, personality, mood, effort)
• Situational attribution


  An external factor caused the behaviour (e.g., the task, other people, luck)
• Attributing outcomes to stable factors gives people a sense of prediction and control
• Correspondent Inference Theory


  Attribute behaviour to a corresponding personality trait or disposition
• Behaviour is more informative of an enduring disposition when it is freely chosen, unexpected, departs from what norms and roles dictate, and produces fewer desirable effects
• Jones and Harris (1967) supported correspondent inference theory - participants made more correspondent inferences regarding speeches that were freely chosen vs. assigned, but correspondent inferences were still present in the no choice condition
• Covariation principle


  The cause of a behaviour should be present when the behaviour occurs and absent when it does not
• Kelley's (1967) Covariation Model


  Consider whether behaviour would be the same or different with different people, stimuli, and occasions
• Rachel is nice to Bart


  • consensus - Are other people nice to Bart?
  • distinctiveness - Is Rachel nice to other people?
  • consistency - Is Rachel always nice to Bart?
• • Although we can use the information, we don't always use it
  • Can be poor at determining covariation
  • May simply attribute causality to most salient feature
  • Requires multiple observations
• Fundamental attribution error


  Tendency to overlook situational factors and instead make internal attributions for others' behaviour
• Fundamental attribution error is supported both in laboratory setting and the real world
• Jones and Harris study - people thought essays reflected the author's beliefs even when the situation could completely explain the behaviour (assigned position)


  • Attribute poverty to the person rather than social conditions
• Participants randomly assigned to generate or answer difficult trivia Qs, but rated each person's general knowledge as if the quizmaster knew more due to the role (the situation), not accounting for this enough
• Attribution is a two-step process (Gilbert & Malone, 1995)


  1. Identify the behaviour and make personal attribution (fast and automatic)
  2. Amend attribution to account for situational factors (requires thought and effort)
• People can form quick judgments of others based on behaviour, and adjust for the situation less when under cognitive load or unmotivated
• Why are dispositional inferences primary?

  We attribute events to factors that are perceptually salient (Heider, 1958); the person is usually more salient than the situation
• When situational constraints were made salient, participants from Eastern cultures were less likely to display the fundamental attribution error than those from Western cultures
• Cultural influences


  Western cultures have an independent view of self, use abstract traits to describe people

  Eastern cultures have an interdependent view of self, see context as important
• Internal attributions more likely as threat increases (e.g. more severe damages in an accident, victim's situation is similar to perceiver's, perceiver identifies with victim, perceiver generally anxious about threats to self)
• Belief in a just world

  The world is a fair place, good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people
• Blaming the victim helps people feel safe, in control, and that the world is a fair place
• Central traits


  Warmth and competence
• Primacy and valence effects


  Impression Formation
• Asch's configural model (1946) - some traits are more useful for constructing an integrated impression, with central traits (e.g. warm vs. cold) having a larger impact on impressions than peripheral traits (e.g. polite vs. blunt)
• Two fundamental social dimensions (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007)

  • Warmth: good or ill intent

  Competence: ability to act on intentions
• Primacy effect - earlier information has a bigger impact on impressions (Asch, 1946)
• Negative information is more distinctive and has a bigger impact on impressions
• Perseverance of belief


  Confirmatory hypothesis testing

  Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Darley and Gross (1983) - participants' ratings of a child's academic potential were affected by background information (high/low SES) only after watching a video of her average performance, not before
• When people think about their theories or opinions, it consolidates the viewpoint, but asking them to consider an alternative viewpoint can provide a solution