Chapter 4 – Perceiving Persons

The process by which people come to understand one another

Situational Scripts: expectations of what’s likely to occur in a given situationWe sometimes see what we expect to see in a particular situation.We use the social situation to explain the causes of behavior.

Behavior Evidence
Nonverbal Behavior
1) Detecting emotion
2) Situational cues
3) Body language
4) Eye contact/ gaze
5) Touch
Behavior that reveals a person’s feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues.

Traits that exert a powerful influence on overall impressions.

Fritz Heider (1958)
The “father of attribution theory”
A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviorWe observe, analyze, and explain other’s behavior in terms of attributions that are either:

Personal Attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort.
internal (personal, dispositional), -OR-


Situational Attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck.
external (situational)

“Correspondent Inference Theory”
People try to infer whether others’ actions correspond to dispositions or not.ChoiceExpectedness of behaviorIntended effects (a.k.a. non-common effects)

Co-variation Principle: A principle of attribution theory that holds that people attribute behavior to factors that are present when a behavior occurs and are absent when it does not.

Consensus
Comparison across people: How do others react to the same stimulus?
Consistency
Comparison across time: How does the person react to this stimulus on different occasions?
Distinctiveness
Comparison across situations/stimuli: How does the person react to different stimuli?

The tendency to estimate the liklihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind.

The finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates.

The tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred by did not.

The tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions ,attributes, and behaviors.

The tendency to focus on the role of the personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior.

We tend to see other people's behaviors as being caused by their personal disposition, whilst perceiving our own actions as due to situational factors.

A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control