SOCIAL PERCEPTION & ATTRIBUTION

Presented by:

Ivy Greatel V. Dalandangan

SOCIAL PERCEPTION

Social perception is the study of how people form impressions of and make inferences about other people.

Refers to the processes through which we use available information to form impressions of other people, to assess what they are like.

We learn about other's feelings and emotions by picking up on information we gather from their physical appearance, and verbal and nonverbal communication.

Facial expressions, tone of voice, hand gestures, and body position are just a few examples of ways people communicate without words.

A real world example of social perception would be understanding that someone disagrees with what you said when you see them roll their eyes.

Social perceptions can obviously be flawed - even skilled observers can misperceive, misjudge, and reach the wrong conclusions. Once we form wrong impressions, they are likely to persist.

ATTRIBUTION

Attribution is being able to successfully identify a person's behavior based on the current context of the situation

Attribution is the process through which we link behavior to its causes - to the intentions, dispositions and events that explain why people act the way they do.

For example, if you are at a wedding, you attribute everyone's happiness because getting married is a cause to celebrate.

Most importantly, social perception is shaped by

individual's motivation at the time, their emotions,

and their cognitive load capacity. All of this

combined determines how people attribute certain

traits and how those traits are interpreted

THEORIES STUDIED

Attribution Theory

Implicit Personality Theory

Attribution Theory

• A large component of Social Perception is attribution.

• Attribution helps individuals understand and rationalize the

behavior of others through the use of information gathered by

observation.

FR

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Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early part of the 20th century

Fritz Heider

Harold Kelley Bernard Weiner

• People make attributions to understand the world around them in order to seek reasons for a particular individual’s behavior.

• When people make attributions they are able to make judgments as to what was the cause of a certain behavior.

• However, a common mistake people make is called Fundamental Attribution Error.

Fundamental Attribution Error

• This means that the original explanation for the behavior was misidentified.

• An example of this would be a mother misattribut-ing her son's excitement to sugar from the candy he just ate, as opposed to the real cause of his excitement being that his favorite TV show is on.

• This is called attribution theory.

• “Attribution theory deals with how the social perceiver uses information to explain events.

• It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991).

• Attribution theory is concerned with how and why ordinary people explain events as they do.

How do we attach meaning to other's behavior, or our own?

Implicit personality theory

• Implicit personality theory is commonly associated with social perception because it identifies the biases we exhibit based on the limited information we know about unfamiliar people.

• Every day we interact with unfamiliar people and in those brief moments of interaction we pick up on the social cues presented and opinions are formed.

• Implicit Personality Theory states that people divide the personality traits of others into two groups:

Central/Primary traits

Peripheral/Secondary traits

Central/Primary traits Peripheral/Secondary traits

Central traits are the highly influential traits that have a strong impact on the overall impression of an individual.

Peripheral traits are those produced and have smaller impact on the overall impression.

• Implicit personality theory helps explains social percep-tion through the use of central and peripheral traits.

• When you are paying at the check out line at the grocery store and the cashier woman comes across as snappy and rude these are the central traits because we as customers want polite service. From that central trait, as you walk away with your groceries the periph-eral traits, such as attractiveness or intelligence is tainted by her central trait of being rude.

• Implicit Personality Theory helps people to socially perceive others by generating a broader outlook on their personality using central and peripheral traits and use these traits to categorize people to predict their behavior.

• According to the implicit personality theory, people pay attention to a variety of cues, including visual, auditory, and verbal cues to predict and understand the personality of others.

• These help in filling in the gap of the unknown information about a person, which is key for social skills and social interactions.

• Social perception refers to the initial stages in which people process information in order to determine another individual’s mind-set and intentions

Social Bias

Social bias is defined as

"prejudicial attitudes towards

particular groups, races, sexes, or

religions, including the conscious

or unconscious expression of these

attitudes in writing, speaking, etc

(social)."

Some of the major effects of social

bias

1. Self

2. Group

3. Interaction

1. Self

Dunning–Kruger effect – an effect by which people may

perform badly at a task, but lack the mental capability to

evaluate and recognize that they have done poorly

(Hawes).

Egocentric bias – The tendency to give more credit to

ourselves from positive outcomes than an observer.

Overconfidence bias – Overestimating one's own

confidence (part of the Dunning–Kruger effect).

Forer effect (Barnum effect) – Placing high belief in a

general description thinking it was meant specifically for

an individual. One example is horoscopes

2. Group

Status quo bias – Tendency to favor certain

circumstances because they are familiar.

Ingroup bias – Behaving a certain way to become more

favorable in a group

Stereotyping – Attributing traits to people based on

certain traits of the group.

3. Interaction

Halo effect – Tendency to believe in the nature of a

person (good/bad) based on general traits of people

False consensus – Assuming others agree with what we

do (even though they may not).

Projection bias - Assuming others share the same belief

as us.

Actor-observed bias - Tendency to blame our actions on

the situation and blame the action of others base on

their personalilties.

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