Chapter 04

Social Perception

Maliha Khalid
Senior Lecturer, Psychology Department
Lahore Garrison University
 Chapter Outline

• Social Cognition, person Schemas, roles and scripts

• Impression formation; Stereotypes Attribution; Bias in

attribution, Research in attribution.
 What is Cognition
• Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in
gaining knowledge and comprehension.

• These cognitive processes include thinking, knowing, remembering,

judging, and problem-solving.

• These are higher-level functions of the brain and encompass

language, imagination, perception, and planning.
 Definition of Social Cognition
• According to American Psychological Association (APA) Social Cognition
is how people perceive, think about, interpret, categorize, and judge
their own social behaviors and those of others.

• According to Baron, ‘Social Cognition refers to the manner in which we

interpret, analyze , remember and use information about social world.’

• Social Cognition—how we think about the social world, our attempts to

understand it, ourselves and our place in it (Fiske & Taylor, 2008; Higgins
& Kruglanski, 1996)?
 Social Cognition

• Social cognition involves:

• The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to
know about the people in the world around us.

• The study of the mental processes that are involved in perceiving,

remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our
social world.

• The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world,

how this information is stored in memory, and how it is then used to
interact with other people.
 Development of Social Cognition
• Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As children grow,
they become more aware not only of their own feelings, thoughts, and
motives but also of the emotions and mental states of others.
• Children become more adept at understanding how others feel, learning how
to respond in social situations, engaging in prosocial behaviors, and taking the
perspective of others.
• one of the most popular focuses on the work of the psychologist Jean Piaget.
According to Piaget, a child's cognitive development goes through a series of
stages.
❑During the earliest stages of development, children are very egocentric. They
see the world from their own perspective and struggle to think about how
other people may view the world.
❑As children grow older, children become increasingly adept at perspective-
taking and have an increased ability to think about how and why people act the
way they do in social situations.
Development of Social Cognition
• One of the most important developments in the early emergence of social
cognition is the growth of a theory of mind. Theory of mind refers to a
person's ability to understand and think about the mental states of other
people.
• The growth of mental state is believed to take place primarily during the
preschool years between the ages of 3 and 5.
• Theory of mind develops as children gain greater experience with social
interactions. Play, pretend, stories, relationships with parents and peers
allow children to develop stronger insight into how other people's thinking
may differ from their own.
• Social experiences also help children learn more about how thinking
influences actions.
• According to theory of mind, skills tends to improve progressively and
sequentially with age.
 Nature of Social Cognition

• There are two basic ways to make sense of social world around us.

• Automatic Thoughts / Processing

• Controlled Thoughts / Processing

1. Automatic Thought / Processing in Social
Cognition
• We often our thinking about the social world proceeds on “automatic”—quickly,
effortlessly, and without lots of careful reasoning.
Basic advantages of Automatics Processing in Social Cognition are –
• It need very little or no efforts.
• It can be very efficient.
• It can lead to satisfactory judgements (Dijksterhuis & Olden, 2006)
• But, It can also lead to major errors in conclusions.
• Example---Heuristic means simple rule of thumb which are quick and
effortless. Mental shortcuts for solving problems in a quick way that delivers a
result that is sufficient enough to be useful given time constraints.
• Schemas are mental frameworks that help us to organize social information,
and that guide our actions and the processing of information relevant to those
contexts.
 2. Controlled Thought / Processing in Social
Cognition
• It occurs when something unexpected happens.
• Unexpected events often triggers such careful, systematic, logical
effortful thought, creative thinking, critical thinking and problem
solving.
• It involve portions of the prefrontal cortex especially the medial
& ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.
• Recent evidence suggests that automatic and controlled processing
may often occur together, especially in situations involving some
uncertainty (Sherman et al., 2008). The distinction between automatic
and controlled processing is indeed real—and very important.
 Errors in Social Cognition- Total rationality is
rare
• 1. Optimistic bias–a powerful predisposition to overlook risks and expect
things to turn out well.

• 2. Tilts or tendencies- we are subject to a wide range of tendencies which

can lead to errors. For example- tendency to be optimistic. Career path to
pursue; whom to marry; picking stocks to invest – our actions often reflect
overconfidence & optimism (Gärling, Kirchler, Lewis, & van Raaij, 2009).

• 3. Overconfidence barrier– To have greater confidence in our beliefs or

judgments than is justified. lacking critical information i.e. we do not
know enough to know what we have missed.
Errors in Social Cognition- Total rationality is
rare
• 4. Planning fallacy—our tendency to believe that we can get more done
in a given period of time than we actually can, or that a given job will take
less time than it really will (Buehler et al., 1994). For example- schedules
for public works like new roads, airports, bridges, etc.

• 5. Counterfactual Thinking – Situation specific. The tendency to imagine

other outcomes in a situation than the ones that actually occurred
(“What might have been”). It can affect our sympathy for people who
have experienced negative outcomes.
 Cultural Differences
• Social psychologists have also found that there are often important
cultural differences in social cognition.
• When looking at a social situation, any two people may have wildly
different interpretations.

• Each person brings a unique background of experiences, knowledge,

social influences, feelings, and cultural variations.

• The same social behavior in one cultural setting may have a very
different meaning and interpretation if it was to take place or be observed
in another culture.
Person Schemas
 Schema in Psychology
• A schema in psychology refers to how information is organized, it focuses
on how the human mind does it.
• A schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and
interpret information.
• We use schemas because they allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting
the vast amount of information that is available in our environment.
Schema Examples
• For example, a young child may first develop a schema for a horse. She
knows that a horse is large, has hair, four legs, and a tail. When the little girl
encounters a cow for the first time, she might initially call it a horse.
 Schema in Psychology
• After all, it fits in with her schema for the characteristics of a horse; it is a large
animal that has hair, four legs, and a tail.
• Once she is told that this is a different animal called a cow, she will modify her
existing schema for a horse and create a new schema for a cow.
• Let's imagine that this girl encounters a miniature horse for the first time and
mistakenly identifies it as a dog.
• Her parents explain to her that the animal is actually a very small type of horse,
so the little girl must at this time modify her existing schema for horses.
• She now realizes that while some horses are very large animals, others can be
very small.
• Through her new experiences, her existing schemas are modified and new
information is learned.
 Types of Schemas
• What are the four types of schemas:
• Person schemas are focused on specific individuals. For example, your
schema for your friend might include information about her appearance,
her behaviors, her personality, and her preferences.
• Social schemas include general knowledge about how people behave in
certain social situations.
• Self-schemas are focused on your knowledge about yourself. This can
include both what you know about your current self as well as ideas about
your idealized or future self.
• Event schemas are focused on patterns of behavior that should be
followed for certain events. This acts much like a script informing you of
what you should do, how you should act, and what you should say in a
particular situation.
 How Schemas Change
• The processes through which schemas are adjusted or changed are known as
assimilation and accommodation.
❑In Assimilation, new information is incorporated into pre-existing schemas.
Example: When a child learns the word for dog, they start to call all four-legged
animals dogs. This is assimilation
❑In Accommodation, existing schemas might be altered or new schemas might
be formed as a person learns new information and has new experiences.
❑ Example: A child may have a schema for birds (feathers, flying, etc.) and then
they see a plane, which also flies, but would not fit into their bird schema
• Schemas tend to be easier to change during childhood but can become
increasingly rigid and difficult to modify as people grow older.
• Schemas will often persist even when people are presented with evidence that
contradicts their beliefs.
Class Task

• Write some examples of Assimilation and

Accommodation.
 How Schemas Affect Learning
• Schemas influence what we pay attention to. People are more likely to pay
attention to things that fit in with their current schemas.
• Schemas also impact how quickly people learn. People also learn
information more readily when it fits in with the existing schemas.
• Schemas help simplify the world. Schemas can often make it easier for
people to learn about the world around them. New information could be
classified and categorized by comparing new experiences to existing schemas.
• Schemas allow us to think quickly Because of the existing schemas, people
are able to assimilate this new information quickly and automatically.
• Schemas can also change how we interpret incoming information. When
learning new information that does not fit with existing schemas, people
sometimes distort or alter the new information to make it fit with what they
already know.
Roles

&

Scripts
 Roles in Social Psychology
• In social psychology, a role is defined as the collection of expectations
that accompany a particular social position. Indeed, the word originates
from the French role, which denoted the parchment from which an actor
read his lines.
• Each individual typically plays multiple roles in his or her life; in different
contexts or with different people, a particular person might be a student, a
friend, or an employee.
• Each of these roles carries its own expectations about appropriate
behavior, speech, attire, and so on.
• What might be rewarded for a person in one role would be unacceptable
for a person occupying a different role (e.g., competitive behavior is
rewarded for an athlete but not a preschool teacher)
 Roles in Social Psychology
• Roles range from specific, in that they only apply to a certain setting, to
diffuse, in that they apply across a range of situations.

• For example, Gender roles influence behavior across many different

contexts; although someone may be a cashier when she is on the clock,
she is a woman across all settings. Role theory examines how these roles
influence a wide array of psychological outcomes, including behavior,
attitudes, cognitions, and social interaction.
 Different Categories of Social Roles
• In social Psychology, there are different categories of social roles:

• Cultural roles: roles given by culture (e.g. priest)

• Social differentiation: e.g. teacher, taxi driver

• Situation-specific roles: e.g. eye witness

• Bio-sociological roles: e.g. as human in a natural system

• Gender roles: as a man, woman, mother, father, etc.

 Role Theory
• Role theory is a concept in sociology and in social psychology that considers most
of everyday activity to be the acting-out of socially defined categories (e.g.,
mother, manager, teacher, student etc).
• Each role is a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms, and behaviors that a
person has to face and fulfill.
• The model is based on the observation that people behave in a predictable way,
and that an individual's behavior is context specific, based on social position
and other factors.
• Within social psychology, role theory has generally focused on roles as causes of
(a) behaviors enacted by individuals or groups and (b) inferences about individuals
or groups.
• One of the fundamental principle of social psychology is that the social and
physical environment exerts a profound influence on individuals’ thoughts and
behavior.
 Role Theory
• For example, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated that normal
college students displayed strikingly different behaviors depending on
whether they were assigned to be guards or prisoners in a simulated prison
environment.
• Within a short time, prisoners began to show submissive behaviors,
whereas prison guards began to show dominant, abusive behaviors.
• In general, people are motivated to behave in ways that fit valued social
roles. Rewards stem from alignment to valued social roles, and
punishments stem from misalignment to such roles.
 Script
• Because of social roles, people tend to know what behavior is expected of
them in specific, familiar settings. A script is a person’s knowledge about
the consequence of events expected in a specific setting ( Schank &
Abelson, 1977).
• A script can be best understood as a package of knowledge that a person
has about particular kinds of situations that he or she has encountered
frequently.
• Some scripts are culturally common, everyone you know shares them, and
some scripts are idiosyncratic, which means that only you know about them.
• When you refer to something that takes place in a restaurant you can leave
out most of the details because you know that your listener can fill them in.
You know what your listener knows.
 Script
• But, if you were telling a story about a situation that only you were familiar
with, you would have to explain what was happening in great detail.
• Knowing that your listener has the baseball script, you can describe a
game to him or her quite quickly.
• But, if you were speaking to someone who had never seen a baseball
game you would either have to make reference to a script the listener
already had (cricket perhaps) or else you would be in for a long
explanation.
• Scripts help people understand what others are telling them and also
help people comprehend what they are seeing and experiencing.
• Example When a person wants to order in a restaurant and starts to talk to
the waiter and he hands the person a piece of paper and a pencil, the
person is surprised.
 Script
• He or she may not know what to do but, the person may have had
experience with private clubs that want orders written down. If
not, the person will ask.
• When expectations are violated and when a script fails and
things don’t happen the way a person expected, he or she must
adjust.
 What happens when Scripts Fail

• Scripts fail all the time and this is why people have trouble understanding
each other. Their scripts are not identical.

• What one person assumes about a situation—the script he or she has built
because of the experiences he or she has had—may not match
another’s because that person has had different experiences.

• Children get upset when their scripts fail. They cry because what they
assumed would happen didn’t happen.
 What happens when Scripts Fail

• Their world model is naive and faulty. But they recover day by day, growing
scripts that are just like the ones that adults have.

• They do this by expecting, failing, explaining their failure (maybe they

ask someone for help), and making a new expectation, which will
probably fail too someday. This cycle of understanding is a means by
which people can learn every day from every experience.
 Rigidity with Scripts
• Some people stop learning. They expect all scripts to be followed
the way they always were. They get angry when a fork is on the wrong
side of a plate because that’s the way it has always been and has to
be. All people have such rigidity in their scripts at some point.
• They have scripts that others wouldn’t consider violating because they
want to live in an orderly world. People confuse other people when
they fail to follow culturally agreed upon scripts.
• People depend on other people to follow the rules and their
understanding of the behavior of others depends on everyone agreeing
to behave in restaurants the way people behave in restaurants. It is so
much easier to communicate that way.
 Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment
• One famous experiment known for studying the ways that people adopt
Social Roles and Scripts was the Stanford prison experiment,
conducted by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues
at Stanford University.
• In the summer of 1971, an advertisement was placed in a California
newspaper asking for male volunteers to participate in a study about
the “psychological effects of prison life”.
• The pool of volunteers was whittled down to 24 healthy male college
students. Each student was paid $15 per day and was randomly
assigned to play the role of either a prisoner or a guard in the study.
• A mock prison was constructed in the basement of the psychology
building at Stanford.
 Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment
• Participants assigned to play the role of prisoners were “arrested” at their
homes by Palo Alto police officers, booked at a police station, and subsequently
taken to the mock prison.
• The experiment was scheduled to run for several weeks. To the surprise of the
researchers, both the “prisoners” and “guards” assumed their roles with zeal.
• In a relatively short time, the guards came to harass the prisoners in an
increasingly sadistic manner, through a complete lack of privacy, lack of basic
comforts such as mattresses to sleep on, and through degrading chores and
late-night counts.
• The prisoners, in turn, began to show signs of severe anxiety and
hopelessness—they began tolerating the guards’ abuse. After only six days, the
experiment had to be ended due to the participants’ deteriorating behavior.
 Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment
• One possible conclusion of this experiment is that the guards and
prisoners enacted their social roles by engaging in behaviors appropriate to
the roles: the guards gave orders and the prisoners followed orders. Social
norms require guards to be authoritarian and prisoners to be
submissive.
• When prisoners rebelled, they violated these social norms, which led to
upheaval. Perhaps the specific acts engaged by the guards and the
prisoners derived from scripts.
• For example, guards degraded the prisoners by forcing them do push-ups
and by removing all privacy. Prisoners rebelled by throwing pillows and
trashing their cells.
Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment
• It should be noted that some of the Stanford Prison Experiment’s
findings have been called into question, and Zimbardo has been
criticized for using unethical and unscientific practices.
• For example, were the guards and prisoners really following
scripts and norms, or were they over-exaggerating their behaviors
in order to “please” the experimenter, or re-enacting behaviors
they had heard about or seen?
 Impression Formation

• Impression is an idea, feeling about something or someone

especially one formed without much efforts or on the basis of little
evidence.
• Impression formation is a social psychology term which refers to the
way in which strangers develop perceptions of each other.
• Impression formation is how people perceive others based on several
characteristics they see during the initial process.
• The impression formation process occurs more often when individuals
act in a certain manner (which, in many cases, is not their outlook).
 Impression Formation
• Such actions are meant to communicate certain personalities or behavior
so that they can induce a likable perception of themselves to other
people.

• A good Example is during an interview. An interviewee would be dressed

and behave to portray modesty, all to win the favor of the interviewers.

• People will judge and evaluate others based on the details presented on
the receiving end.
• Impression formation can lead to a biased opinion but is not always
wrong, given that less is usually known about a person during the initial
encounter.
 Impression Formation Theory
• Impression formation theory assumes that individuals do not weigh all
traits equally when meeting new people.
• Some traits will be considered heavier (also known as central traits such
as being loyal, kind, agreeable, friendly), influencing other subsequent
traits observed during further interactions.
• While other traits are taken lightly (the peripheral traits), making such
characteristics less influential.
• An example is when people meet someone they perceive to be distrustful,
other traits observed or identified will be based on disbelief or doubt.
• Another assumption is that people are more likely to observe traits they
have in other people. For instance, introverts will easily identify qualities
attributed to introversion when interacting with others.
 Stereotypes
• The positive or negative beliefs that we hold about the characteristics of social
group.

• A stereotype is a fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or

class of people.

• Stereotypes lead to social categorization, which is one of the reasons for

prejudiced attitudes (i.e. “them” and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups
and out-groups.
 Stereotypes
• Example- we may believe that all lawyers are smart, a positive stereotype; or
we may believe that all lawyers are devious, a negative stereotype. Many years
ago, the political journalist Walter Lippmann aptly called stereotypes “pictures
in our heads.” When we encounter someone new who has a clear membership
in one or another group, we reach back into our memory banks of stereotypes,
find the appropriate picture, and fit the person to it
 Attribution in Social Psychology
• In social psychology, attribution is the process of inferring (concluding)
the causes of events or behaviors.
• In real life, attribution is something we all do every day, usually without
any awareness of the underlying processes and biases that lead to our
inferences.
• For example, over the course of a typical day, you probably make
numerous attributions about your own behavior as well as that of the
people around you.
• Like When you get a poor grade on a quiz, you might blame the teacher
for not adequately explaining the material, completely dismissing the
fact that you didn't study.
 Attribution in Social Psychology
• When a classmate gets a good grade on the same quiz, you might attribute
their good performance to luck, neglecting the fact that they have excellent
study habits.
Types of Attributions
• The main types of attributions you may use in daily life includes the following.
• Interpersonal Attribution
• When telling a story to a group of friends or acquaintances, you are likely to tell
the story in a way that places you in the best possible light.
• Predictive Attribution
• We also tend to attribute things in ways that allow us to make future
predictions. If your car was damaged, you might attribute the crime to the
fact that you parked in a particular parking garage. As a result, you may avoid
that parking garage in the future.
 Types of Attributions
• Explanatory Attribution
• We use explanatory attributions to help us make sense of the world around
us. Some people have an optimistic explanatory style, while others tend to
be more pessimistic.
• People with an optimistic style attribute positive events to stable, internal,
and global causes and negative events to unstable, external, and specific
causes.
• Those with a pessimistic style attribute negative events to internal, stable,
and global causes and positive events to external, stable, and specific
causes.
 Theories of Attribution
• Psychologists have also introduced a number of different theories to help
further understand how the attribution process works.
Heider's 'Common Sense' Theory
• In his 1958 book, "The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations," Fritz Heider
suggested that people observe others, analyze their behavior, and come
up with their own common-sense explanations for their actions
• Heider groups these explanations into either external attributions or
internal attributions. External attributions are those that are blamed on
situational forces, while internal attributions are blamed on individual
characteristics and traits.
 Theories of Attribution
Three-Dimensional Model
• Bernard Weiner proposed that a person's own perceptions or attributions as to
why they succeeded or failed at an activity determine the amount of effort the
person will engage in activities in the future.
• When attributions lead to positive affect and high expectancy of future success,
such attributions should result in greater willingness to approach similar
achievement tasks in the future than those attributions that produce negative
affect and low expectancy of future success.
Weiner's achievement attribution has three categories:
• stable theory (stable and unstable)
• locus of control (internal and external)
• controllability (controllable or uncontrollable)
• Stability influences individuals' expectancy about their future; control is related
with individuals' persistence on mission; controllability influences emotional
responses to the outcome of task.
 Biases and Errors in Attribution
• The following biases and errors can also influence attribution.
The Actor-Observer Bias
• When something happens, we are more likely to blame external forces
than our personal characteristics. In psychology, this tendency is known
as the actor-observer bias.
• The theory of the actor-observer bias was first developed by E. Jones and R.
Nisbett in 1971, whose explanation for the effect was that when we observe
other people, we tend to focus on the person, whereas when we are actors,
our attention is focused towards situational factors.
• People tend to attribute other people's behaviors to their internal factors
while attributing their own actions to situational factors.
Biases and Errors in Attribution
• In the same situation, people's attribution can differ depending on their role
as actor or observer.
• For example, when a person scores a low grade on a test, they find
situational factors to justify the negative event such as saying that the
teacher asked tough questions that’s why they were unable to perform well.
• However, if another person scores poorly on a test, the person will
attribute the results to internal factors such as laziness and
inattentiveness in classes.
 Biases and Errors in Attribution
Self-Serving Bias
• Think about the last time you received a good grade on an exam. Chances
are that you attributed your success to internal factors, such as "I did well
because I am smart" or "I did well because I studied and was well-
prepared.“

• you are more likely to attribute your failure to external forces, such as "I
failed because the teacher included tricky questions" or "The
classroom temperature was so hot that I couldn't concentrate.“

• Social Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the self-serving bias.