Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Social perception

Social perception: the process through which we seek to know other people

Nonverbal communication: an unspoken language of facial expressions, eye contact, body movements, and touching

• Body language reflects emotions through the positions, postures, and movements of the body
• People can express emotions through vocal effects, such as tone, volume, pitch, and rhythm
• The facial feedback hypothesis: our nonverbal cues may influence our internal feelings.
• Nonverbal cues for deception:
  • Microexpressions: facial expressions lasting only a few tenths of a second
  • Interchannel discrepancies: nonverbal cues and body language that are inconsistent with each other
  • Exaggerated facial expressions
• Signs of deception in linguistic styles:
  • pitch of the voice often rises
  • taking longer to respond to a question or being slower in describing events
  • start sentences, stop them, and begin again
• Detecting deception accurately is very difficult, but e.g. secret agents are slightly better at it

Attribution: efforts to understand why people have acted as they have

Jones and Davis’s theory of correspondent inference: we attempt to infer others’ traits from observing certain aspects of their behavior

• especially behavior that is:
  • freely chosen
  • produces noncommon effects
  • is low in social desirability

Kelley’s covariation theory: we are interested in whether others’ behavior stems from internal or external causes

• We focus on information relating to:
  • consensus: the extent to which other people react to a given stimulus or event in the same manner as the person we are evaluating
  • consistency: the extent to which the person in question reacts to the stimulus or event in the same way on other occasions, over time
  • distinctiveness: the extent to which the person reacts in the same manner to other, different stimuli or events

Other dimensions of causal attribution:

• Specific causes of behavior being stable or unstable over time
• Behavioral causes are controllable or not controllable

Action identification: The interpretation we place on an act in terms of differing degrees of abstraction

• Example: Seeing someone put coins in a jar
  • Concrete interpretation: she wants to avoid losing the coins
  • Abstract interpretation: she wants to save money for her education

Correspondence bias: the tendency to explain others’ actions as stemming from their dispositions (internal), even in the presence of clear situational causes (external)

Actor–observer effect: the tendency to attribute our own behavior to external causes but that of others to internal causes

 Self-serving bias: the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to internal causes, but negative ones to external causes.

• Especially strong for negative events, which we often attribute to external agents rather than aspects of ourselves
•  A related aspect of the self-serving bias is hubris. People who exhibit hubris often perceive themselves as being solely responsible for positive outcomes

Impression formation: the process through which we form our views of others

• Central traits such as warm and cold can influence the interpretation of other traits
• First impressions are formed very quickly, but are changed upon learning new information
• Impression management/self-presentation:
  • Self-enhancement: efforts to boost one’s appeal
  • Other-enhancement: efforts to induce positive moods or reactions in others
  • These techniques work but if they are overdone, they can be recognized for what they are, and generate negative rather than positive reactions from others

References:

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

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