Social Perception
• How we form impressions of and make
inferences about other people
• Non Verbal Behavior
• Cues
• Attribution
• Nicholas Humphrey (1976) evolutionary
psychologist argued that our intellect
evolved for social processing.
• The ability to communicate non verbally is
at the core of this social intellect.
• Enables one to adapt to the social context
over a short timescale
Non verbal communication
• communication intentionally or
unintentionally without words
• Nonverbal production – encoding
• Nonverbal perception – decoding
(recognition and interpretation)
• To express emotion
• Convey attitudes
• Communicate personality traits
• Facilitate or modify verbal communication
• Facial Expressions and Emotion
Darwin believed that human emotional
expressions are universal
Current research indicates that about 6
major emotional expressions that are
universal
Happiness, sadness, anger, surprise,
disgust and fear
• Ekman & Friesen’s (1971) study with New
Guinnea tribes’ people
• Hansen & Hansen (1988) pick out the
discrepant face
Non verbal cues in humans and other
species
• Social Status & Dominance
indicators of dominance are interpersonal distance & movement,
staring vs gaze avoidance, withdrawal vs approach
Formal dominance – alpha males appear bigger than they are, low
status chimps bow & emit a ‘pant – grunt’ (Tomasello & Call, 1997)
• Affiliation
Touch & grooming
• Izard(1971) – lesioned the eighth cranial nerve of Rhesus
monkeys
• Mirror Neuron – Rizzolatti, Parma Italy
macaque monkeys – some neurons in the inferior
frontal cortex that responded when the monkey
picked up a peanut also responded when the
monkey saw a person pick up a peanut
10% of neurons have this mirror property in the
inferior frontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex
• Culture influences facial display of
emotions
Japan – display rules are different
• Eye Contact – ‘look them in the eye’
vs averted gaze
• Personal Space
• Emblems
• Paralanguage
You want to move to Japan
Dogs barking
Babies crying
• Gender Differences
• Women are more accurate interpreters of non
verbal cues than men
• Meta Analysis - Hall (1978)
• Gender Role Expectations
• The Problem of Deception
non verbal leakage
fidget, halting, more negative
• Men are better at detecting lies
• Motivation to detect deception
Toris & DePaulo (1984) Simulated job
interviews – forewarned about deception
Highly involved people maybe worse at
detecting deception than those less
involved
Attribution Theory
• Attribution Theory: how the social
perceiver uses information to arrive at
causal explanation for events.
• To predict and control events
One must know how things happen to make
them happen
Heider’s Theory of Naïve Psychology
• Locus of Causality is in the person
(internal) or in the environment (external)
or both.
• Internal – motivation and ability
Jones and Davis’s Correspondent
Inference theory
• The goal of the attribution process is to
make correspondent inferences about
another person: to reach the conclusion
that the behavior and the intention that
produced it correspond to some underlying
stable quality in the person, that is, a
disposition.
• The Analysis of Non Common Effects
• Distinctive consequences
• Infer dispositions more confidently when
there are fewer noncommon effects
between the chosen and unchosen
alternative
• Other cues
• Actor’s Choice
• Social Desirability
• Social Role
• Prior Expectations
Kelley’s Covariation Theory
• Distinctiveness
• Consistency over time/modality
• Consensus
• Discounting Principle
tendency to de-emphasize the role of one
particular cause to the extent that other
plausible causes exist.
Weiner’s Attribution Theory
• Locus – Internal external
• Stability – stable unstable
• Controllability – controllable uncontrollable
• Fundamental Attribution Error
tendency to attribute another person’s
behavior to his/her dispositional qualities
rather than to situational factors
• Gilbert, Pelham & Krull (1988) – Cognitive
Busyness
• The Actor –Observer Effect
The tendency to explain others behvr as
due to dispositional factors and one’s own
behvr as due to situational or unstable
factors
• Positive vs Negative Outcomes
• False Consensus Effect
the tendency to see one’s own behvr as
typical, to assume that under the same
circumstances others would have reacted
the same way
• Ross, Greene & House – ‘Eat at Joe’s’
Agreed 62%
Did not agree 67%
• Self Serving Attributional Bias
The tendency to take credit for success and
deny responsibility for failure
• Group Serving Bias
• Pessimistic Attributional Style
• Peterson, Selligman & Vaillant 1988 –
1942 -1944 graduating class at Harvard
• Reattribution Training