Transcript Basic Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences

Chapter 4
Perceiving Persons
Social Perception
• The process by which people come to
understand one another.
• We’ll look at:
– The “raw data” of social perception
– How we explain and analyze behavior
– How we integrate our observations into coherent
impressions of other persons
– How our impressions can subtly create a distorted
picture of reality
– We’re both perceiver and target
Observation: The Elements
of Social Perception—Persons
• First impressions are often subtly influenced
by different aspects of a person’s appearance.
• We prejudge people based on facial features.
– We read traits from faces, as well as read traits
into faces, based on prior information.
– We judge “baby-faced” adults differently than
“mature-faced” adults.
– Why? Explain the explanation.
Silent Language of Nonverbal Behavior
• Behavioral cues are used to identify a person’s
inner states, as well as his or her actions.
• What kinds of nonverbal cues do people use?
– Facial expressions of emotion and ….
Distinguishing Truth from Deception
• Freud: “No mortal can keep a secret… betrayal
oozes out of him at every pore.”
• Channels of communication differ in terms of
ease of control.
– Face is relatively easier for deceivers to control.
– Nervous movements of our body are somewhat
harder to control.
Why Do We Have
Difficulty Detecting Deception?
• Mismatch between the behavioral cues that
actually signal deception and the ones used to
detect deception.
• Four channels of communication provide
relevant information:
– Words: Cannot be trusted
– Face: Controllable
– Body: Somewhat more revealing than face
– Voice: Most revealing cue
– Perceivers tune in to the wrong channels
Attribution Theories
• Dispositions: stable characteristics, such as
personality traits, attitudes, and abilities
• Attribution theories describe how people
explain the causes of behavior
• Heider: Explanations can be grouped into two
categories:
– Personal Attributions (Internal disposition)
– Situational Attributions (External)
Attributional Biases
• Do we really analyze behavior in a rational,
logical manner?
• Do we really have the time, motivation, or
cognitive capacity for such elaborate and
mindful processes?
• The answer?
– Sometimes yes…Sometimes no.
Cognitive Heuristics
• Cognitive heuristics are informationprocessing rules of thumb.
– Enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy
• Problem is that using cognitive heuristics can
frequently lead to error.
Availability Heuristic
• The tendency to estimate the likelihood that
an event will occur by how easily instances of
it come to mind.
• Problems with relying on the availability
heuristic:
– False-consensus effect
Fundamental Attribution Error
• When we explain other people’s behavior we
tend to:
– Overestimate the role of personal factors, and
– Overlook the impact of situations
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• The process by which one’s expectations
about a person eventually lead that person to
behave in ways that confirm those
expectations.
• Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in
the Classroom” study