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
--Chapter 3
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