Transcript of Audio Lecture
Welcome to lesson nine,
module four. Let’s begin by moving to slide two.
Social perception. Here
we’re going to talk not just about first perceptions but attributions as
well. Attributions are why we think people did the things they did.
That is, we attribute behavior to some cause. In determining that
cause, we may make several errors as well as several types of
attribution and we will be discussing those at length.
Move on to slide three.
We form impressions from familiarity, behavior, salient cues, and both negative
and positive information. For example, if a person is familiar to us,
the impression we form may be one of familiarity, it may be more
positive, we may have different attributions for people who are familiar
to us than for people who are not. We also use people’s behavior to
inform attributions so if someone appears to be running very quickly
through campus, we may infer from that behavior that they are late,
however, if someone seems to be chasing them, we may have a very
different attribution to why they’re running. Salient cues. Those are
things in the environment that stand out. This is different from
accessibility. Remember. Accessibility is what’s on top in your mind.
While salient is what is on top in the environment. We also tend
to form impressions more from negative information. It is very
powerful. Negative information is often remembered longer and it’s
harder to overcome if you’re trying to make a positive impression.
Let’s move on to slide
four. There are essentially two types of attributions we can make that
we’re going to discuss in this chapter. Later we will talk about
attributions at length in later chapters. The first is internal
attributions and the second external attributions. Internal
attributions means it’s something about the person. So if you make an
internal attribution about your performance on the test, you estimate
your performance is related to something innate in you. An external
attribution would be blaming the professor or calling the test easy to
make an external or outside of the person attribution.
Let’s move on to slide
five to discuss other differences. Why do we make different
attributions to ourselves versus others. First you have more knowledge about
yourself. You’ve been with yourself your whole life and essentially
you’re never absent from yourself. And therefore we choose different
attributions for ourselves versus others, as well as different
attributions for success versus failure. For example, there are two
patterns of attributions. One that is more masculine and one that is
more feminine. The masculine is circled here in blue, that is when
someone succeeds and they make a masculine attribution, that’s going to
be an internal attribution and they’re going to say they’re very smart.
However, if they fail and need to make an attribution, they will make an
external attribution. That is the test is difficult or the professor is
unfair. There’s also a feminine style of attribution. Let’s say that
when one fails, then you should make an internal attribution. That is,
if you’re not very smart, perhaps you’re dumb. While there is a success
attribution made, it is external, that is, you must have just gotten
lucky if you did do well. We know that for strangers we tend to make
more internal attributions. We don’t look at the situations, we look at
the person. So if we see a stranger slip on some ice and fall, we may
assume that that person’s a klutz as opposed to assuming the sidewalk is
slick. However, for our friends we may be more likely to take into
account the situation and determine that yes, the sidewalk is slick and
that should be fixed. We are especially likely to do this for our
romantic partner. In fact, the ability to do this for our romantic
partner is a good of commitment in the relationship.
Let’s move on to slide
six. The fundamental attribution error is similar to what we were just
discussing, that is we tend to over-estimate the dispositional influence
in a situation and under-estimate the situation itself. That is, when
someone slips on the ice, we assume that they’re a klutz, we make it
something about their disposition, but when we slip on the ice, we tend
to make it something about the situation. However, if that person tends
to slip on the ice, we under-estimate the ice or the situation. We
don’t think of ourselves as being klutzy, we are looking at the ice.
You can think of this as being a camera approach. Whatever you’re able
to look at is what you will blame, so as you’re watching someone else
fall, you’re looking at that person, but as you’re watching yourself
fall, you’re looking at the ice.
Let’s move on to slide
seven. Correspondent inference. This is that we look to informative
behaviors, that is we look to freely chosen behaviors. We assume that
if someone freely chooses to do something, that should tell us more
about them than if they’re forced to do something. When you visit a
friend’s home and when you were in high school and that room was very
clean, if they freely chose to clean their room, then you might think of
them as a very clean person. However, if you know their parents are
very strict and won’t let them leave the house until the room is clean,
you wouldn’t see that as an informative behavior. We also look to
non-common effects. Non-common is not the same as uncommon. Non-common
means there’s only one explanation. The only reason someone would do
that would be because of this particular reason. For example, if you
choose to help out at a homeless shelter. There may not be non-common
effects if you’re also a criminal on probation doing community service.
However, if there was no other reason for you to be there, then one
might have to infer that you were indeed kind or generous with your
time. This would be an example of a non-common effect. There’s only
one explanation. We also like to look at behaviors that are low in
social desirability. That is, if someone does something that is
socially desirable, we take into account that they were under social
pressure to do that and so the only reason they said it was because it
was the polite thing to say or the good thing to do when being watched
by others. But when someone does something that’s low in social
desirability, we assume that that’s very indicative of their actual
nature. We also look to unexpected behaviors. For example if a
professor is typically very harsh, but comes up with an extra credit
after a very difficult test, that might be unexpected and we might see
that as very informative. That this professor, perhaps, is kinder than
we might have imagined. When we’re forming impressions, we can
categorize, characterize and then correct. That is, we put someone into
a category as perhaps klutzy-type folks and then we characterize them as
typically uncoordinated and then we may correct if later we see that
they are very coordinated, it was only the ice that got them caught up.
And all of this is dependent upon our cognitive resource availability.
This all takes thought. If you don’t have the cognitive resources to
form an impression based on these things, then chances are you’re not
going to go through the correcting process, you’re simply going to
categorize people and react to them in that way.
Let’s move on to slide
eight. Causal attributions. Situational versus dispositional. We’ve
discussed the fundamental attribution error and this tends to be our
default. We can think of it as the actor/observer effect. So this
little girl, what she will remember later, is everything in that orange
triangle, the people she’s taking the picture of, and she will assume
that what they’re doing is not because of her, but because they’re
genuinely kind folks. However, the elderly man sitting there looking at
the little girl, will remember the little girl taking the picture and
assume that she’s an inquisitive child and have very little memory of
what the other people were doing or why she might have been taking the
picture.
Let’s go on to slide
nine. Confirmation bias. We try to find evidence for our impressions,
so once we’ve categorized and characterized someone, we then try to
confirm what we believe about them, so we seek confirmation not
disconfirmation. Remember again the waitress versus librarian study.
People were not looking for unexpected things to find in a waitresses
home, rather they were looking to confirm their stereotypes about
waitresses. Here you see a very messy room. You should try to guess
whether this person is a male person or a female person. In almost
every class, there’s an equal distribution of people who believe this is
a male room versus a female room and they all want to form their
impressions if you ask them to recall what’s in the room, recall things
that confirm their bias. What do you think?
Let’s move on to slide
ten. Another theory that tells us what we use when we’re making
attributions is Kelly’s covariation theory. It consists of three parts,
consistency, distinctiveness and consensus. Take a few minutes to watch
both of these films by double clicking on the 53 as well as the man in
the bookstore. Once you’ve watched those, then continue. Until then,
please pause the audio.
Now let’s move on to
slide eleven. When we’re trying to make an attribution, consistency
means we have to ask ourselves is this always happening. For
distinctiveness, does it happen in other situations. In consensus, does
anyone else do it. So for the man in the bookstore, the consistency
component is does this always happen, every time he goes to a signing at
this bookstore, does this guy come and hit him with a stick. For
distinctiveness, we would have to decide whether this happens not only
at this bookstore, but at bookstores across the country as he makes this
tour. And then consensus; is it just this guy that follows him around
and beats him with a stick, or do other people in other cities also do
this.
Slide twelve. Here you
see a table of consensus, distinctiveness and consistency and the
corresponding attributions, so if you have high consensus, that is
everyone does it, everyone beats this guy with a stick, and people don’t
beat everyone with sticks, they only beat this guy with a stick and they
do it all the time. Then we assume that it’s something about the
author. However, we have low consensus, so it’s just this guy Joe
beating him with a stick and he typically beats everyone that goes to a
book signing with a stick and he does it all the time, then we say it’s
something about Joe. However, if we have a pattern where consensus is
low, that is only Joe does this and distinctive, and he only does it
to this guy and consistency is he’s only done it this one time, then we
may infer it’s something about the situation. Joe had too much coffee
this day and the guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Let’s move on to slide
thirteen. Here you see the title of the book that the author wrote. It
takes effort for us to make this new attribution that it would have to
be something about the guy, given the title of the book. And this takes
effort. Most of us in our day to day existence don’t have the cognitive
resources in order to correct our impressions because it does take so
much effort.
Let’s move on to slide fourteen.
Perceptual implications. This is when our impressions are based on
what draws the most attention, that is, if you have green hair, that
probably draws people’s attention and their impression will likely be
based on your hair color and little else. There’s some interesting
implications for dating, and also implications for group discussion.
Remember there’s a distinction between salience and accessibility.
Now the implications for dating are clear. That is, your
impression will be based on what draws the most attention. And we know that negative things
tend to draw the most attention, so if anything negative happens on the
date, then that’s going to be what’s going to help them form the most
lasting impression.
Let’s talk a little bit
more about this positive/negative concept. Move on to slide fifteen.
For every two positive things there needs to be one negative thing.
That is, in order to get rid of that one negative thing you have to have
two positive things going for you. And we tend to integrate this
information. However, there is a primacy effect, that is, first
impressions are powerful. So if the first thing someone encounters when
they meet you is something positive, then they may try to explain away
the negative. For example, if you have a professor that you like quite
a lot and think is very nice and yet one day at Wal-Mart you see this
person rudely push someone aside, you may have to explain that away. You
would want to be right with your first impression. Remember the
confirmation bias. You would explain the negative situation by that
person must have been very rude to them or maybe that person’s having a
bad day. On the other hand, if the person starts with a negative
impression of you, and then sees you do something positive, they’re
going to see that positive thing again as an exception to the rule of
negativity. They’re going to see the negativity as persisting.
Let’s move on to slide
sixteen. There is accuracy motivation, that is, we like to be accurate,
we like to be right. The only time that we tend to avoid accuracy is
when we’re trying to enhance in a personal relation. That is, if we’re
trying to get along with someone or develop a friendship and we may
decide that being accurate isn’t as important as liking the person. But
we also have confirmation bias. So even though we want to be accurate,
we also seek information that will make us accurate as opposed to
finding ways to have a better impression or a more accurate impression.
We seek information that will confirm the impression we already have.
Let’s move on to slide
seventeen. Defending impressions. As we’ve discussed, it’s very hard
to change first impressions. People seek confirmation and very rarely
ask diagnostic questions. That is, when we start meeting someone, the
first questions that we ask are not very diagnostic of what that
person’s like, especially at the beginning of relationship. You might
ask what someone’s major is or what their favorite color is. This just
doesn’t really tell us anything about that person. There are a series
of questions that have been researched that show that they give people
much more a feeling of friendship and knowing and tend to be more
diagnostic of what kind of person that person is, than the ones that we
typically ask when we meet someone. Such as do you dream in color, what
are your nightmares, how would you like to be buried, what do you see at
your funeral; things like that.
Let’s move on to slide
eighteen. We like to protect our impressions. We make defensive
attributions, that is we try to maintain that first impression that we
have because we like to believe that we’re accurate. We also have
unrealistic optimism. The idea that if we are luckier than most people,
that we’re better than most people. If I asked even people in this
class to rate themselves in terms of a few things you’ll do better than
average, average, or below average on the test based only on the average
for this class. Most people, meaning more than is realistic, will say
they will do better than average, but by definition, half of the people
will do worse than average. Belief in a just world is another way in
which we protect our impressions. What goes around comes around, people
get what they deserve. This is largely used to defend our beliefs about
rape systems. We believe that the world is just, we must believe that
the rape victims did something to bring it on. This belief in a just
world is held more frequently by females than males. We like to believe
that the world is just, because we like to believe that we live in a
world that will dole out what we have coming and as long as we’re good
enough people, bad things won’t happen to us.
Let’s move on to slide nineteen.
So why are we wrong; why are our impressions wrong, I mean we know we
have these biases. One reason is that we only see people in
limited settings. You aren’t with most people all the time, with
exceptions of children during the first few years of life.
Self-fulfilling prophecies is another reason. That is, people act
in a way that we expect them to act. So if you expect that
someone’s going to be rude, you’re probably going to engage in
non-verbal behaviors that will then cause them to be rude. And
others concur with us. That is, we like to find others who believe
like us, so if we find Bob to be
rude, we might find someone else and ask them what they think of Bob and
because we tend to seek out others with similar or are just like us,
they will say they also believe Bob is rude, therefore we must be right,
we must be accurate, Bob is in fact rude. The self-fulfilling prophecy
says that every time we see Bob, we treat him perhaps in a way that
makes him act in a rude way and we only see Bob in those settings where
we also are engaging in those self-fulfilling prophecies.
That concludes lesson
nine. Thank you very much.
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