Social perception

Social Perception is the study of how people form impressions of and make inferences about other people.^[1] We learn about others' 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. Closely related to and affected by this is the idea of self-concept, a collection of one’s perceptions and beliefs about oneself.

An important term to understand when talking about Social Perception is attribution. Attribution is expressing an individual’s personality as the source or cause of his/her behavior during an event or situation.^[2] Most importantly, social perception is shaped by an individual's current motivations, emotions, and cognitive load capacity. Cognitive load is the complete amount of mental effort utilized in the working memory. All of this combined determines how people attribute certain traits and how those traits are interpreted.

Theories Regarding Social Perception

Attribution theory

A large component of Social Perception is attribution. Attribution is the use of information gathered through observation to help individuals understand and rationalize the behavior of others. Psychological research on attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in 1958, and was subsequently developed by others such as Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. People make attributions to understand the world around them in order to seek reasons for an individual’s particular behavior. When people make attributions they are able to make judgments as to what was the cause or causes of a certain behavior. Attribution theory is the study of what systems and models people implement in order to make attributions about the behavior of others. It attempts to explain how we use information about the social environment to understand others' behavior.

One common bias people exhibit in attribution is called Fundamental Attribution Error. Fundamental Attribution Error is the tendency for people to attribute others' actions or behaviors to internal traits as opposed to external circumstances.^[3] An example of how this may manifest in the real world as pointed out in research by Furnham and Gunter is how one’s view of the justness of poverty may be affected by his/her financial status: one who has not experienced poverty may see it as being more or less deserved than might someone who has been impoverished at some point.^[4] In this way, fundamental attribution error can be a barrier to empathizing with others, as one does not consider all the circumstances involved in the actions of others.

Two-Step Process of Making Attributions

When an individual makes an attribution, he or she first makes an internal attribution and then makes an external attribution. Heider's most valuable contribution to the topic of attribution is the dichotomy: When attempting to decide why individuals behave a certain way, we can make either an internal or external attribution.^[1] Internal attribution, (also called dispositional attribution or personal attribution^[5]), is the assumption that an individual is acting a certain way due to something about that individual, such as, personality, character, or attitude. External attribution, (also called situational attribution), is the inference that an individual is acting a certain way due to the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most individuals would respond in the same way in that similar situation. Essentially, people first assume that a person's behavior is due to his or her personality, and then attempt to modify this attribution by also factoring in the person's situation.^[1]

Jones's Correspondent Inference Theory

According Edward Jones and Keith Davis, the correspondent inference theory states that people learn about other individuals from behavior that is chosen freely, that is not anticipated, and that results in a small number of favorable outcomes.^[1] There are three factors that people use as a basis for their inferences:

1. An individual's degree of choice
2. The expectedness of the behavior
3. The intentions or motives behind the effects or consequences of the behavior

Kelley's Covariation Theory

According to American social psychologist, Harold Kelley, individuals make attributions by utilizing the covariation principle. The covariation principle claims that people attribute behavior to the factors that are present when a certain behavior occurs and the factors that are absent when it does not occur.^[1] There are three types of covariation information that are particularly helpful: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.

If a single individual and a large majority of individuals behave similarly in reaction to a specific stimulus, then the individual's behavior is attributed to the stimulus and is high in consensus. The individual's behavior due to this specific stimulus should be compared to the individual's behavior in reaction other stimuli within the same broader category. This helps judge wether the level of distinctiveness information is high, and thus attributed to the stimulus. Lastly, consistency information is used to see what happens to the behavior at another time when the individual and the stimulus both remain unchanged.^[1]

Information Integration Theory

Norman H. Anderson, an American social psychologist, developed the information integration theory in 1981. The theory states that impressions are made from the perceiver's personal dispositions and a weighted average of the target individual's characteristics.^[1] The differences among perceivers are due to people using themselves as a standard, or frame of reference, when judging or evaluating others. People also tend to view their own skills and traits to be favorable for others to also have. These impressions formed about others can also be influenced by the current, temporary mood of the perceiver. A concept called, priming also affects a perceiver's impressions of others. Priming is the tendency for recently perceived or implemented concepts or words to come to mind easily and influence the understanding of the new information.^[1] Trait information also impacts people's impressions of others, and psychologist Solomon Asch was the first to discover that the existence of one trait tends to indicate the existence of other traits. Asch claimed that there are central traits which are traits that exert a strong effect on the perceiver's overall impressions.^[1] Lastly, the sequence in which a trait is realized can also influence the trait's impact. Research shows that there is a tendency for information presented at the beginning of a sequence to have a greater effect on impressions than information presented later on, a concept called primacy effect.^[1]

Implicit Personality Theory

A person’s implicit personality theory consists of the system of beliefs and biases the person uses to form impressions and make attributions about the personalities of others, based on what information is available.^[6] Put in another way, implicit personality theories describe the way in which an observer uses the traits displayed by another person to form impressions about that other person. People pay attention to a variety of cues, including: visual, auditory, and verbal cues to predict and understand the personalities of others, in order to fill in the gap of the unknown information about a person, which assists with social interactions.

Certain traits are seen as especially influential in the formation of an overall impression of an individual; these are called central traits. Other traits are less influential in impression formation, and are called peripheral traits. Which traits are central or peripheral is not fixed, but can vary based on context. For instance, saying that a person is warm versus cold may have a central impact on an individual’s impression formation when paired with traits such as “industrious” and “determined,” but have a more peripheral impact when paired with traits such as “shallow” or “vain”.^[7]

Kim and Rosenberg^[6] demonstrate that when forming impressions of others, individuals assess others on an evaluative dimension. Which is to say that, when asked to describe personality traits of others, individuals will rate others on a “good-bad” dimension. People’s implicit personality theories also include a number of other dimensions, such as a “strong-weak” dimension, an “active-passive” dimension, an “attractive-unattractive” dimension, etc. However, the evaluative “good-bad” dimension was the only one that universally appeared in people’s descriptions of others, while the other dimensions appeared in many, but not all, people’s assessments. Thus, the dimensions included in implicit personality theories on which others are rated vary from person to person, but the “good-bad” dimension appears to be part of all people’s implicit personality theories.

Testing

TASIT (The Awareness of Social Inference Test) is an audiovisual test that was created for the clinical assessment of social perception. The test is based upon several critical components of social perception that are critical to social competence using complex, dynamic, visual, and auditory cues to assess these critical components. The test assesses the ability to identify emotions, a skill that is impaired in many clinical conditions. It also assesses the ability to judge what a speaker may be thinking or what their intentions are for the other person in the conversation, also referred to as Theory of Mind. Lastly, the test was developed to assess the ability to differentiate between literal and non-literal conversational remarks. The test is divided into three parts to measure; emotion, social inference – minimal, and social inference enriched. The test is composed of scenes, or vignettes, and those being assessed are asked to identify the emotions, a, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and meanings of the interactions. They are also assessed on more complex interactions to assess ability to interpret sarcasm.^[8] The results of this testing assess the level of social perception of an individual.

TASIT has adequate psychometric properties as a clinical test of social perception. It is not overly prone to practice effects and is reliable for repeat administrations. Performance on TASIT is affected by information processing speed, working memory, new learning and executive functioning, but the uniquely social material that comprises the stimuli for TASIT will provide useful insights into the particular difficulties people with clinical conditions experience when interpreting complex social phenomena.^[8]

Bias

Encountering various cultures often promotes diversity.^[9] However, for some, the opposite occurs. Preconceived prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination otherwise known as social biases fit this mold.^[10]

Self

• Dunning–Kruger effect – an effect by which test takers fail to understand their poor performance because they suffer a double fault: A.) Shortfall of knowledge prevents them from producing correct responses & B.) Shortfall of knowledge prevents them from recognizing their lesser responses when compared to those of others.^[11]
• Overconfidence bias – When one's confidence is greater than one's ability.^[11]
• Egocentric bias – The tendency within a group to accept more responsibility than attributed by others ^[12]
• Defensive attribution hypothesis - The tendency of people to attribute more blame to the perpetrator of an accident as the consequences become more severe.^[13] However, if people perceive themselves to be more similar to the perpetrator characteristically or circumstantially they will rate the perpetrator as less culpable for the accident as the severity of consequences increase. If people perceive themselves as less similar they will rate the perpetrator as more culpable.^[13]
• Forer effect (Barnum effect) – Placing high belief in a general, vague description thinking it was meant specifically for an individual. For instance, people interpret horoscopes as applying to their specific situation, when in actuality the horoscope was written to apply to a wide range of people's experiences.^[14]
• Counterfactual thinking – Tendency to think up alternative events or outcomes that might have happened, but did not.^[1]
• Belief perseverance – Tendency to continue to believe in the ideas that have already been discredited.^[15]
• Self-fulfilling prophecy – The method by which an individual's expectations about another individual eventually cause that other individual to act in ways that confirm those expectations.^[16]

Group

• Status quo bias – Tendency to favor certain circumstances because they are familiar.^[17]
• Ingroup bias – Behaving a certain way to become more favorable in a group.^[18]
• Stereotyping – Attributing traits to people based on certain traits of the group.^[19]

Interaction

• Halo effect – Tendency for an opinion in one area to influence the opinion in another area.^[20]
• False-consensus effect – Assuming others agree with what we do (even though they may not).^[21]
• Base-rate fallacy – People are rather insensitive to consensus information and data in the form of numerical base rates.^[1]
• Psychological projection – A defense mechanism people subconsciously use in order to grapple with challenging feelings or emotions.^[22]
• Actor-Observer bias – Tendency to blame our actions on the situation and blame the action of others based on their personalities.^[23]

Accuracy of Social Perception

It is true that people fall for the biases identified by social psychologists and for some biases that may have not yet been identified. Despite these misjudgments, there are four reasons that soundly prove people's competence as social perceivers:

1. People can more accurately perceive social behaviors and interactions when they have a greater history of experiences with the other people.
2. People can make more regulated predictions of how other individuals will act when he or she is in their presence.
3. Social perception skills have the chance to be improved through learning the rules of probability and logic.
4. People can make more precise inferences about others when motivated by concerns for open-mindedness and accuracy.^[5]

See also

• Interpersonal perception
• Joint attention
• Framing (social sciences)
• Nonverbal communication

References