SOCIAL PERCEPTION

2008PSY—Social Psychology
Mt Gravatt Campus, Griffith University
Week 3, Semester 2, 2015
Taking in data from the social world
• Perception involves a set of processes with which
you are familiar (e.g., 1st yr biol psych)
• raw sensory data → perceptual processes
• Social perception is equally important
• we cannot deal with all the data that the social world
throws at us all of the time
• the hungry social brain again—automatic thought
does the heavy lifting!
• controlled thought  motivation to engage + spare
cognitive workspace
• Social perception processes shape and guide our
“reality” more than we think
• motivation; fatigue; environment; schemas → biases??
Aims and outline
• The aim of this lecture is to introduce you in more
depth to the processes that both underlie and
drive forward perceiving people and events
• most important social psych question comes from here:
did it happen because of the person or the
situation?
• Attribution theory and it’s consequent (often
biased) processes
• the key theory of this week

• We are not going to cover implicit personality theories in

the course
Why do we study causal attribution?
• People want to know why things happen
• predicability, control, understanding etc
• "Things" to do with other people are especially important
• we have to interact and depend on various other people and groups
whether we like it or not
• In the social world, two basic choices when trying to explain
someone's actions: person vs situation
• various synonymous terms: internal vs external; dispositional vs
situational etc
• Different theories across different times present various
mechanisms by which this occurs—with consequences
• There is even a study of individual differences based on how
the social world is interpreted
• As with other mechanisms, too much reliance on rules of
thumb can lead to biases in perception, not accuracy
Heider (1958) - naive psychology
• Early attribution theorists suggest that an
understanding of what makes the social world tick
cannot be gained without making inferences
about the causes of behaviour
• Assumption that people use rational, scientific
cause-effect analyses to understand the (social)
world
• Internal/dispositional vs. external/situational
attributions
• paradigm that was a foundation for the field (& onwards)
Covariation (ANOVA) model (Kelley, 1967)

• Harold Kelley (1960s-70s)—rational cause-effect

model
• This a slightly painful but necessary model to cover
• E.g. of "not quite right" model that drove field forward a lot
• Example: you visit a academic staff member to ask for
an extension and they respond angrily to you.
• n.b., Academic = person; vs context/everything else: the situation

• consistency - does this academic always (hi) or rarely (lo)

respond to your extension requests in an angry way?
• distinctiveness - does this academic respond to all requests
in an irritated way (lo) or just extension requests (hi)?
• consensus - do other academics respond to your extension
requests in an irritated way (hi) or just this one (lo)?
 Kelley -- 2 x 2* factorial model
• If consistency is low,
Distinctiveness
people discount
hi lo • see next slides
• Seems out of the ordinary,
Situational, or
so very likely to be some
external other, external attribution
hi • Something
Unclear
about asking
• contradictory • If consistency is high
data
• see factorial at left
Consensus

for extensions
is likely cause
• This can rule out a lot of
Person, or salient events in
Unclear
internal
• Something
people’s social lives
• contradictory
data
about the • People are not so strictly
lo academic is
likely cause determined, we don't
always act consistently
Criticism of Kelley (and others)
• Covariation detection per se is a very weak human ability
(e.g., Alloy & Tabachnick, 1980s paper)
• E.g., illusory correlation (Chapman & Chapman, 1967)
• Rarely get “data” from multiple events anyway
• makes it like an experiment with only one participant
• (Perceptual) salience more influential than covariation
• Consensus information less persuasive than
distinctiveness and consistency
• E.g., Hewstone and Jaspers (1983), McArthur (1972)
• We focus less on situation/background and more on person…
Discounting and augmentation
• Formal rationality assumption hard to sustain
• but… we can't just assume that people are idiots!
• people’s judgements not just affected by data
• The situation may suggest to perceivers that they can’t
just take the data we have at face value
• Discounting principle
• relegating importance of particular causes if there are other
plausible causes
• think of a confound from methodology classes

• Augmentation principle
• upgrading the importance, on a similar basis to above
• persons acted in a way despite the presence of plausible causes of the
opposite action
Counterfactual Thinking
• What was once possible but now definitely is or isn’t
• E.g., If Australia had defeated Netherlands at the 2014 World Cup…
• Wells and Gavanski (1989)-mutability of the event
• a disabled couple who both use wheelchairs call cab to go out.
• It’s late, then driver refuses to take them so they take their own,
modified car
• a bridge has just collapsed because of a storm
• their car crashes into river and they are killed

• R:
• The returning taxi a) crosses bridge before it collapses; or
• b) crashes into river as well and driver barely gets out alive
• How much was the driver a cause of their deaths (0-8)
• List 4 things that could have been different in the story to prevent the
deaths
Wells and Gavanski, 1989, Expt. 2
% mutations TO DRIVER’s
Causal rating (0-8) DECISION To refuse

5 100
4.5 90
4 80
3.5 70
3 60
2.5 Mutate 50 Mutate
2 first 40 first
1.5 Rate 30 Rate
1 cause first 20 cause first
0.5 10
0 0
Cab not Cab Cab not Cab
in also in in also in
accident accident accidentaccident
Applications of attribution theory
• Explanatory styles (Peterson, Seligman, and
Vaillant,1988; c.f., Weiner, 1985)
• Habitual ways of explaining events—motivational component
• Standard assessment involves people generating likely causes for good
and bad events that might happen to them
• internal (something about them) vs external (something about
other people or the situation)
• stable (likely to be present again in future) vs unstable
• global (affects many domains) vs specific (only some)
• Correlates with desirable/undesirable outcomes
• Marital satisfaction/dysfunction research
• e.g., work of Bradbury and Fincham and others
Peterson et al, 1988—longitudinal data:
Harvard undergraduate men
1940s 1960s 1970s

Age 25: Health assessed from medical records

Writing task
regarding worst
experiences in
WWII
Increasing
Coded by correlation with
judges physical health
many years later
Optimistic
explanatory
style
Attribution biases
• Previous material suggests that the process of
attribution might not to be so objective and
rational
• e.g., people may not always make cause-effect
analyses
• Many attributional biases are evident
• from 50s/60s to present, gradual shift from deficit
model…
• all people seek to maximise cognitive understanding of social
world in an almost deliberate way
• … to understanding that we perceive the world
differently because of who we are in terms of selves,
groups and cultures
• as for all social cognition, need 1) motivation + 2) cognitive
workspace to overcome potential biases
Biases in attribution (1)
• Correspondence bias - systematic bias to
internal/dispositional factors
• used to be known as fundamental attribution error (FAE) and often still
is
• Seminal work is classic pro-/anti-Castro study by Jones and Davis
(1965)
• now, we have 2 step model—start with person and allow situation
in (text book shows diagram)
• Actor-observer effect - our own behaviour attributed
externally, others' internally
• see one paper for next tute!
Biases in attribution (2)

• False consensus effect - judge our own

behaviour as typical -- as the "consensus“
• Ross, Greene and House (1980), classic sandwich
board study (Eat at Joe's!)
• Self-serving biases - self-esteem management
• tend to attribute success internally & failure externally
• but culture plays a role here too
• more in the dissonance reduction lecture
• self-handicapping - anticipatory bias
Biases in attribution (3)
• Belief in a just world
• in a world that is just, fair and predictable, bad things happen to
bad people (& vice versa) and not good people
• Melvin Lerner (1980)—we want to believe that the world is predictable
and when random misfortunes occur, the belief is challenged
• appears to be a more implicit than explicit belief
• public attitudes: aboriginal health, refugees, victims of crimes such
as rape, generally -- blame the victim
• This is a very robust effect that has been examined in a variety of
labs and cultures around the world.
• People often respond negatively to uncertainty and randomness (of
outcome)—the randomness suggests lack of control
• illusion of control (Langer, 1975)
• 1970s tradition of rationality research
• the cognitive underpinning of social attitudes
• "dice in cup studies" basic paradigm